The Cozzolani Reunited Project

(Cozzolani Recréée)

I’ve long been an admirer of the music of Chiara Margarita Cozzolani, a Benedictine nun composer who worked at the convent of Santa Radegonda in Milan. It was in the fall of 2019 that I hit upon the idea of trying to reconstruct the missing continuo parts for her Scherzi di Sacra Melodia. I’ve been working on it steadily through the COVID lockdown.

I think this is one of the most important collections of sacred music for solo voice from the entire seventeenth century (by a composer of any gender), and I’m so happy to be playing a role in letting this fantastic music be heard once again.

My reconstruction of this collection’s twelve motets has been approved for publication in the Web Library of Seventeenth-Century Music, and can be downloaded free of charge here.

An article about Scherzi which I co-authored with Professor Robert Kendrick has appeared in the recent edition of the Italian journal Recercare.

In addition, I have produced and edited remotely-recorded video premiere performances of four of the motets. Please have a look at them below.

A performance of six of the motets alongside other works is planned for The City of Ladies, a festival about women in music produced in June 2021 by the Montréal-based Le Nouvel Opéra in partnership with the Musée des Hospitalières and McGill University. The performance will be featured on Early Music Vancouver’s Digital Concert Hall.

I’d like to thank many people whose work contributed to this project:

The musicologist Jana Kalinayová-Bartová made the brilliant discovery that six of the twelve motets were re-arranged (without attribution) in the 1688 Philomela angelica by the German composer Daniel Speer. Although this complicated the reconstruction work greatly, the continuo parts from these arrangements provided most of the necessary material for the reconstruction. The continuo parts for the other six motets, on the other hand, had to be composed from scratch, a very different kind of challenge!

Professor Robert Kendrick as well as Candace Smith have been advisors to me for the project.

Lysiane Boulva did the initial typesetting of Cozzolani’s canto part.

John Pepper did the meticulous work of reconstructing the motet texts and translating them into English, and has been an invaluable proofreader throughout the process.

The Pluralism Fund provided support for the edition.

The Canada Council for the Arts provided support for the production of the video performances.

Here is Pietro Paulo Melli’s simple piece for solo lute entitled “Corrente della la Cozzolana” which we assume is dedicated to Cozzolani.

Please enjoy these world premiere recordings of four of the Scherzi motets, two each sung by sopranos Suzie LeBlanc and Ariadne Lih. Each of the four performances has two videos, one with English subtitles and one with French.

Because the works were originally composed from within a female religious community, I’m grateful that these premiere performances could also take place in a convent. The voice parts were recorded in the old chapel of the Religieuses Hospitalières de Saint-Joseph by kind permission from the City of Montreal and the collaboration of the Musée des Hospitalières de l’Hôtel-Dieu de Montréal.

The continuo accompaniments were recorded in my home studio in Toronto afterwards. It was quite a complicated process to record these works remotely: recitative style music depends on flexiblity in rhythm and timing, and therefore we couldn’t use a click track to keep us together. We hope that nonetheless it almost seems in the videos as if we were making music together at the same time!