FREE ESSAY ON WOMEN IN MUSIC

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 with…writing, 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
tradition, as she writes in a loosely formulaic melodic language that works more by
motivic allusion than by strict adherence to modal range and standard melodic gestures.
She collected her 77 musical works in a volume called the Symphonia harmoniae caelestium
revelationum (Symphony of Harmony of Heavenly Revelations). Her morality play, the Ordo
virtutum, is appended to one manuscript copy of the Symphonia. Hildegard's training is
not particularly exceptional; education at convents was focused on the performance of the
liturgy, and included literacy, Latin, and music. Thus, other nuns may have composed
plainchant -- or even polyphony -- for new feasts and special celebrations. Since most
medieval music is anonymous, however, their contributions are impossible to trace.
Secular composers fared better, probably because secular music is more often copied with
composer attributions. Twenty-one trobairitz (or women troubadours) are known by name.
Though only one composition survives with both text and music copied together (the canso
A chantar written by the Countess of Dia), other works can be reconstructed by supplying
a tune to match the poetic structure. Further examples of women's compositions can be
found among the tensos -- debate poems -- usually with alternating stanzas by the
speakers. A few women trouveres were active in the thirteenth century, but none of their
works survive with music. Some scholars have speculated that songs in a women's voice,
that is, songs in which the speaker is identified as a women, may reflect women's
contributions to the lyric repertory. At the very least, these songs reflect sentiments
and musical styles that seemed to their contemporaries to be appropriate for a woman.
Several articles addressing such songs can be found in Vox Feminae.
Women as Performers
Women were active performers of secular music. Many women performed as amateurs, either
in the home or in courtly or urban settings. Boccaccio's Decameron identifies women
singing and dancing, along with their male companions, as do many of the courtly romances
of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (Page, Owl, pp. 102-106). In the romance
Cleriadus et Meliadice (discussed in Page, Performance), for instance, girls as well as
boys perform for the assembled company by harping or singing. Adults too participated
actively in the festivities, first dancing their fill to the music of minstrels, then
singing. There might you have heard men and women singing well! , says the narrator
(Page, Performance, p. 443)
In addition to informal musical participation, however, women were also active as
menestrelles and jongleuresses. Performers themselves, they traveled as part of small
groups of entertainers, and were often wives or daughters to male minstrels. In some
instances, however, women had independent roles; they were granted permission to
participate in the Guild of Minstrels in Paris from 1321 to the seventeenth century.
Women as Patrons
The role of the patron has often been neglected in histories of music, but a strong
patron could form a center of musical production by gathering and supporting musicians of
all calibers. The lands that Eleanor of Aquitaine (1122-1204) brought to her marriages,
first to Louis VII of France and then to Henry II of England, made her one of the most
politically influential figures of her day, but her cultural endeavors had an equally
profound impact on European civilization. Eleanor's efforts at the court of Poitiers
shaped a culture centered on courtly love and chivalric behavior; her sponsorship
contributed to the success of the troubadours and to the spread of the Arthurian legends.
Other noblewomen may have had a less dramatic impact on musical culture, but they often
had musicians in their personal retinue and so helped to shape the prevailing musical
style. Indeed because women often married far from home, they served as a kind of
cultural network for importing and mingling new ideas, styles, and tastes with the
established norms of their husband's court.
Bibliography
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Benedictines of Bouveret. Spicileggi Friburgensis subsidia; 2-7. Fribourg, Switzerland:
Editions universitaires, 1965.
Edwards, J. Michele. Women in Music to ca. 1450. In Women and Music: A History. 
Ed. Karin Pendle. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press,
1991, pp. 8-28. 
Hildegard of Bingen. Symphonia: A Critical Edition of the Symphonia armonie
celestium revelationum. Barbara Newman, ed. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988. 
The Las Huelgas Manuscript: Burgos, Monasterio de Las Huelgas. 2 vols. Gordon A.
Anderson, ed. Corpus Mensurabilis Musicae 79. N.P.: American Institute of Musicology,
1982
Page, Christopher. The Owl and the Nightingale: Musical Life and Ideas in France
1100-1300. London: J.M. Dent and Songs, Ltd., 1989.
Page, Christopher. The Performance of Songs in Late Medieval France: A New
Source. Early Music 10 (1982): 441-450.
Vox Feminae: Studies in Medieval Women's Song. John F. Plummer, ed. Studies in
Medieval Culture, vol. 15. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1981.
Yardley, Anne Bagnall, 'Ful weel she soong the service dyvyne': The Cloistered 
Musician in the Middle Ages. In Women Making Music: The Western Art Tradition, 1150-1950.
Jane Bowers and Judith Tick, eds. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986,
pp. 15-38.