Laurie Stras introduces the background to Musica Secreta’s new recording of music from the Biffoli-Sostegni manuscript

The Siege of Florence (1558) by Giorgio Vasari, Palazzo Vecchio, Florence San Matteo in Arcetri is the reddish constructing within the backside left of the image

Musica Secreta is the UK’s solely all-female Renaissance ensemble. Their newest album, Ricordanze: a file of affection, is launched on the Fortunate Music label on 1 October. This explores music from the Biffoli-Sostegni manuscript, the one surviving manuscript of polyphony from a Renaissance convent. The manuscript has been the topic of analysis by Laurie Stras, Emeritus Professor of Music on the College of Southampton and director of Musica Secreta. The brand new album acts as a companion to Laurie’s on-line publication within the collection Parts in Girls in Music from Cambridge College Press, titled Music at a Florentine Convent: The Biffoli-Sostegni Manuscript and Suor Maria Celeste Galilei, due for launch in October 2025. I met with Laurie, quite appropriately on the British Library, to seek out out extra about her work on the Biffoli-Sostegni manuscript and its significance.

Initially, Laurie explains that the manuscript is the one recognized Renaissance manuscript of polyphony with a safe provenance from an Italian convent, although she factors out that there are a dozen or extra such manuscripts from the Medieval interval. The Biffoli-Sostegni manuscript is the nuns’ choirbook from the convent of San Matteo in Arcetri, a modest neighborhood within the hills outdoors Florence. It was copied in 1560 for 2 nuns at San Matteo, Suor Agnoleta Biffoli and Suor Clemenzia Sostegni. Therefore the manuscript’s fashionable title – The Biffoli-Sostegni manuscript

Musica Secreta & Laurie Stras recording Ricordanze (Picture: Rosie Taylor)

Laurie began wanting on the manuscript round ten years in the past. It was obvious that it got here from a convent, however which one was not clear. Laurie began wanting and narrowed the manuscript’s potential dwelling to 2 locations. One, a wealthy convent in the midst of Florence and the opposite, a small impoverished convent a mile or so outdoors town. Her makes an attempt to seek out traces of the manuscript within the richer convent’s surviving archives proved fruitless. On the final minute, simply pre-COVID in February 2020, she turned to the smaller convent, San Matteo in Arcetri. Right here, of their comparatively meagre archive, she discovered not solely the names of the 2 nuns who gave the manuscript its title, however the names of their fathers and the sizes of their dowries. One of many fascinating issues that got here out of my chat with Laurie was the way in which that researching a single manuscript moved from musical historical past into a much more complicated net of social and political historical past.  Because of a Leverhulme Emeritus Fellowship, Laurie was in a position to return and end finding out the manuscript, discovering out a terrific deal extra in regards to the girls and their historical past. However she discovered no extra music.
In 1612, Galileo Galilei’s daughter, Virginia, entered the convent and have become Suor Maria Celeste Galilei. San Matteo was chosen as a result of Galileo was involved to put each his daughters in the identical convent. This was technically towards the principles, however convents would wink on the process, supplied ample dowry was supplied. Within the case of San Matteo, its being small and impoverished meant that it was reasonably priced for Galileo.

The convent had strict controls over numbers, and Virginia was solely in a position to enter  as a result of one other nun died. That nun was Suor Clemenzia Sostegni, who died in 1612, having entered in 1541 and been abbess twice. Which signifies that she was nearly definitely aged over 80 when she died. Suor Maria Celeste Galilei grew to become liable for the Workplace in 1630, and as such she would nearly definitely have used the Biffoli-Sostegni manuscript. In one other fascinating hyperlink, Suor Maria Celeste Galilei’s organist colleague was Suor Maria Archilei, who was the daughter of Vittoria Archilei (La Romanina) (fl. 1582 – 1620), the star soprano on the Medici court docket.

Laurie is pretty assured that when Suor Maria Celeste Galilei took over as choirmistress, the manuscript would have nonetheless been in use as a result of it was so particular to the convent and the order. Nuns weren’t in a position to have property, and when a nun died, her belongings had been reabsorbed into the convent. The manuscript’s specificity would nearly definitely have prevented it from being offered.

The Biffoli-Sostegni manuscript

This is not the primary time that Laurie’s analysis has bumped up towards widespread historical past. Her attribution of a e-book of nameless motets, Musica quinque vocum motteta materna lingua vocata (1543), to Suor Eleanora d’Este, the daughter of Lucrezia Borgia, brought about one thing of a stir, not a lot due to the music (which may be very high-quality) however due to Suor Eleanora d’Este’s mom!

The Biffoli-Sostegni manuscript was copied in 1560, a time when the convent was comparatively snug financially. They ate meat and made wine, receiving earnings from promoting the wine in addition to the fruits of their spinning. So, they had been affluent sufficient that the nuns might aspire to have such a manuscript and maybe the households of the 2 nuns talked about paid for it to be copied and certain. The music is especially older, a lot of it nameless, although there are some modern names, together with the Maestro di Capella of Pisa Cathedral. Some items are particular to that convent or their order, so had been in all probability composed for the nuns, however different items are older, together with a chunk by the Franco-Flemish composer Loyset Compère (c. 1445 – 1518).

One mass, Messa sopra Je le lerray, is described by Laurie as being fairly in contrast to something she has seen in early Sixteenth-century music. It’s linked to the Siege of Florence, when in 1539 to 1530 Imperial forces surrounded town. The nuns had been evacuated as a result of their convent was too near the besieging military’s traces. In the course of the siege, the entire metropolis suffered from plague as effectively. The mass is for 3 voices, a completely polyphonic elaboration of a French chanson that seems in Florentine manuscripts. The chanson is a scurrilous one, a couple of lady who leaves her husband as a result of he beats her, but he doesn’t know in regards to the gate the place her lover can get out and in. Laurie sees the topic as presumably linking it to the siege. The Gloria even remembers the sound of trumpets and quotes a defiant motet by town’s maestro Philippe Verdelot (1480 to 1485–1530 to 1540), Recordare, Domine, pleading for an finish to battle and pestilence. 

Laurie Stras & Musica Secreta (Picture: Nick Rutter)

Laurie describes the mass as a sonic evocation of the siege, which leads her to marvel what it was doing in a manuscript copied within the 1560s. Fairly clearly, this was one thing that they saved within the convent that meant one thing to them. Laurie factors out that when writing polyphony for 3 voices all in the identical vocal vary, the conventional guidelines don’t apply – there are examples of dissonance, imitation on the unison and intervals of harmonic stasis. This latter could be one of many few events when you may simply have consonance.

In 1540, lightning struck the bell tower of the convent; it collapsed, however everybody survived, and an annual votive mass was instituted. The four-voice Messa sopra Recordare Virgo Mater from the manuscript was in all probability used for this mass of thanksgiving. Fairly remarkably, the convent was nonetheless giving the annual votive mass in 1694. Laurie describes the music from the mass as being quite wild, particularly using unresolved sevenths within the Agnus Dei!

Laurie has recorded music from the manuscript 3 times with Musica Secreta. On their disc From Darkness to Mild (Obsidian Data, 2019), Musica Secreta recorded Marian motets from the Biffoli-Sostegni manuscript. Alongside these, they included the Lamentations by Antoine Brumel (1460-1513), partly as a result of they had been copied by the identical scribe. In 2022, on Mom Sister Daughter, they recorded the polyphonic vespers of St Clare from the manuscript. These are for 4 voices with huge ranges, the higher voices going punishingly excessive, and the outcomes are very virtuosic. 

But different music within the manuscript is so easy that it might be extemporised. This quite confused Laurie till, within the archives of Florence Cathedral, she got here throughout a manuscript created for the boys of the Cathedral choir within the 1540s. These had been comparable, easy psalms written out in strings of semi-breves, in all probability for the boys who had been beginning out studying. The music easy sufficient for them to extemporise and harmonise. 

The convent had a convention of what they known as Visitations, when the nuns would stand in entrance of the Crucifix, the Blessed Virgin and on the crib of the child Jesus. The entire convent was there, not simply the choir, and Laurie wonders whether or not the straightforward brief items had been created for these events. Not strictly liturgical, however a part of the entire neighborhood’s non secular occasions and simply realized by everybody. In any case, the novices needed to be taught all of the psalms and modes by reminiscence.

What units the Biffoli-Sostegni manuscript aside is the sheer number of music. In cathedral and different bigger institutions, volumes tended to be thematic – all of the vespers music, all of the workplace music and so forth. This manuscript is a combination, a jumble of motets, vespers, plenty, songs and extra. It’s a gathering collectively of the assets the convent had, and Laurie imagines this jumble being given to the copyist to create the manuscript. It provides a complete thought of music sung in a not notably prestigious convent. The nuns weren’t poor; they had been largely from the service provider class, but they weren’t from the wealthy households. You can’t, nonetheless, extrapolate from this to elsewhere, as we have now so few paperwork surviving that inform us what the nuns had been particularly doing.

By the 1580s, music had moved on outdoors of the convent, so the manuscript would have seemed distinctly old style. In 1597, the Archbishop of Florence forbade using devices (violins or plucked devices) in convents or the efficiency of music with one solo voice. It was acceptable to sing polyphony and to accompany it with organ or viols. If there have been solo voices, then they need to sing in Latin; these quite particular directions associated to the modern performances of virtuoso secular music in Italian. Convents had been instructed to learn these orders out in chapter, so that everybody knew. All this was a part of the Archbishop’s marketing campaign to carry nuns extra underneath his management and to pressure the convents to be enclosed. Suor Clemenzia Sostegni, a formidable lady, had a two-year standoff with the Archbishop associated to his want for them to be enclosed. He stopped all new professions to the convent until they submitted.

The tenor, Francesco Rasi, who created the function of Orfeo in Monteverdi’s opera L’Orfeo in 1607, was in 1610 exiled for the homicide of his step-mother’s steward and the tried homicide of his step-mother. This step-mother was the sister of Suor Agnoleta Biffoli (from the manuscript). Finally, the households are reconciled, and Rasi marries his stepmother’s granddaughter however dies two months later. The granddaughter would grow to be an in depth companion of Galileo’s, and the 2 households intermarried.

Thus, the manuscript is surrounded by a decent net of relations between Florentine households. Laurie feedback that the extra you sit with paperwork, the extra what look like completely separate strands of historical past come collectively. We generally tend to think about music historical past as one thing different, however it’s all associated. The music makes its method on the planet interlinked with different strands of historical past. When Musica Secreta carry out this music, it stops merely being music and occupies a spot within the creativeness of the ensemble.

The manuscript is within the library of the Royal Conservatory in Brussels, although Laurie has by no means seen the manuscript itself; she has labored from scans. Throughout the entire time she has been engaged on it, the bodily manuscript has been in restoration as it’s progressively dissolving into mud. The manuscript was acquired by the conservatory within the late nineteenth century, and there are different manuscripts in Brussels by the identical copyist. The convent of San Matteo in Arcetri was suppressed by Napoleon in 1808, and it’s potential that the convent’s library was handed to a different convent of the identical neighborhood, maybe in Belgium.

Musica Secreta shall be performing the music from the manuscript on the Brighton Early Music Competition on 19 October