Women In Music Essays - Medieval Music, Conductus, Las Huelgas Codex

Women In Music History shows that women were not as big of participants in music as men until later in the medieval era. This is due to many obstacles that faced women disabling them from singing, playing any instruments, or even composing music. Although barriers were present, many women and nuns were able to surpass them, and make use of their abilities and skills. In this paper, I will present the role of women as they interacted with polyphony, and as they became scribes, performers, composers, and patrons. Women's involvement with medieval music took a variety of forms; they served at times as audience, as participant, as sponsor, and as creator. The evidence for their roles, like that for their male contemporaries, is sporadic at best. Many musical sources have been lost, and those sources that do survive only occasionally provide composer attributions. Information on specific performances is virtually non-existent, and the references to musical performances gleaned from literary allusions must be read critically. Similarly, a work of art portraying a woman musician may be representational or symbolic, or both. Yet despite these handicaps, modern scholarship reveals many ways in which medieval women were engaged with, and enriched by, the music that flourished around them. Women and Polyphony In at least some convents, women performed polyphony (an extensive discussion of this can be found in Yardley, pp. 24-27). Some of this repertory is preserved in the Las Huelgas codex which stems from the Carthusian monastery for women near Burgos in Northern Spain which housed approximately one hundred nuns and forty choir girls at its prime in the thirteenth century. The manuscript itself contains an extensive collection of polyphony, including three styles of organum: note-against-note, melismatic, and Notre Dame; as well as motets, conductus, tropes, and sequences. Although the manuscript was copied in the fourteenth century, the repertory comes from earlier, especially 1241-1288. The contents of the Las Huelgas Codes is as follows: # 24 polyphonic ordinary movements: 6 2 Kyries and 3 troped Kyries 6 1 troped Gloria 6 1 Credo 6 1 Sanctus and 7 troped Sanctus movements 6 9 troped Agnus Dei movements # 7 polyphonic propers # 31 Benedicamus Domino settings: 6 7 polyphonic settings 6 14 troped polyphonic settings 6 10 troped monophonic settings # 31 Prosae (also known as sequences): 6 11 polyphonic prosae 6 20 monophonic prosae # Modern thirteenth-century genres: 6 59 motets: I 2 four-voice motets I 25 three-voice double motets (with two separate texts in the top voices) I 11 three-voice conductus-motets (with homorhythmic upper voices) I 21 two-part motets 6 17 polyphonic conductus 6 14 monophonic conductus (also known as versus) 6 1 solfeggio The prevalence of polyphony and the heavy use of tropes suggests that this convent, at least, placed a premium on up-to-date musical styles. Other convents may not have had the resources to keep up with the latest musical fashions, but small clusters of polyphonic pieces survive from sixteen different women's convents, suggesting that religious women had at least some interest, and perhaps some training, in composed polyphony. Women as Scribes Women not only read musical books, they also copied them, at least in some instances. While no investigation of women as scribes has been published, evidence for women's roles in scriptoria has been accumulating. It is not known that women's monasteries as well as men's often had active scriptoria. Moreover, an index of colophons from France reveals a significant number of women who signed their scribal works. Though text sources naturally predominate, a few musical sources were signed by women (Colophons, passim). Similarly, though no musical sources survive in her name, Sister Lukardis of Utrecht from the fifteenth century is known to have copied musical manuscripts, because a Dominican friar writes of her activities: She busied herself withwriting, which she had truly mastered as we may see in the large, beautiful, useful choir books which she wrote and annotated for the convent (Edwards, p. 10) Judging by handwriting, notational styles and repertory, a number of unsigned chant manuscripts also stem from the convents in which they were used. Indeed, though relatively few women music scribes are known, many of their sisters may have legacies that hide amongst the unsigned manuscripts of the era. Women as Composers Perhaps the most famous of the medieval women composers is Hildegard of Bingen. Her repertory of sequences and antiphons (sacred songs) stand somewhat outside of the musical