By Ivelisse Estrada

The seventeenth-century nuns Caterina Assandra and Chiara Margarita Cozzolani were among the leading motet composers of their time. Julie Pinel had the privilege of publishing her own music. Antonia Bembo left her country, abusive husband, and children to pursue her muse in France, where five volumes of her manuscripts survive at the Bibliothèque Nationale.

The compositions of these women, all active in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, were until recently forgotten. It is largely thanks to Laury Gutiérrez RI ’09, founding director of La Donna Musicale, that their music has once again found an audience.

La Donna Musicale is a nonprofit organization and an internationally acclaimed ensemble devoted to the performance of music by women composers from the Renaissance, Baroque, and Classical periods. Hardly any other ensemble in the world is so distinguished by both scholarly research and performance.

“I’ve been told that women did not write music before the nineteenth or twentieth century,” Gutiérrez says. “We wish to change that paradigm.”

But bringing the compositions of these women to life isn’t as simple as dusting off old scores. It requires a knowledge and understanding of each composer’s musical grammar and necessitates working from facsimiles of the original manuscripts. To prepare the music for performance, Gutiérrez must convert it to modern notation (musical notation has changed since the Baroque period, much like our spoken and written languages). She must know the work of each composer intimately, be comfortable with her patterns and idiosyncrasies, and also be well versed in the work of the composer’s male contemporaries and the musical nuances of the period in order to make appropriate judgment calls. It’s a painstaking proposition, and Gutiérrez admits that she spends most of her time on the musical notation—more than on researching, recording, or preparing performances for a twenty-first-century audience.

For Gutiérrez, though, it’s time well spent. “This is a dream come true: to be able to put out these CDs and stream the music on our Web site, to know that this music is going to reach thousands of people,” she says. “We’re extending our hands and these composers are reaching out to inspire us.”

Now she and La Donna Musicale are preparing several ambitious pieces by eighteenth-century composer Anna Bon. Gutiérrez herself unearthed one of Bon’s previously unknown works. Thanks to her Radcliffe fellowship, she was able to fast-track the production process and hopes to have a recording of Bon’s music ready by the end of the summer, when it will again be heard after centuries of languishing in a European archive.

It’s a process that Gutiérrez would like to repeat with other unsung women composers. “There’s still much more music to be found and performed,” she says.

To hear streaming audio of three of La Donna Musicale’s CD releases, visit http://www.ladm.org/cds.html.

Photo of La Donna Musicale by Rick Friedman; photo of Laury Gutíerrez by Tony Rinaldo