Women's Roles In The Medieval Era

Women have played a significant role in the evolution of how music is taught, performed, and revered, even though many music history textbooks and courses tend to discount women in music throughout the ages. Women were often private musicians, teachers, and composers, while male composers where more widely recognized by their contemporaries. Women were not considered to be large contributors to music in the Medieval period and the Renaissance era because they were mostly confined to the private sphere and their works often deviated from the male-dominated stylistic norms. To explore the point of women being confined to private sectors, I will be exploring the careers and compositions of Hildegard von Bingen and Maddalena Casulana and to explore
Many of the sources required a significant amount of sifting through, and several of them only had one small tidbit of useful information in them. With that in mind, let us begin with a general overview of women’s known contribution to music prior to the baroque era. According to Cyrus and Mather’s article “Rereading Absence,” women who held the equivalent roles of jongulars, minstrels, and troubadours were often omitted in written history and very few of their compositions remain. Comtessa de Dia, a troubairitz, or woman troubadour, was the composer of “the only extant melody [written] by a woman troubadour.” Women were most often documented taking part in music in the private sphere and mostly for the well-to-do. For instance, noble women were often trained in music as part of their educations, and non-noble or peasant women were often never given formal training. Noble women were also much more likely to be patrons of music and other arts than their non-noble counterparts, but that was because they could afford to be. Music held high esteem in society because of its large role in sacred settings during the Medieval and Renaissance eras. For women, musical training was mostly as a hobby to pass the time, not as a career. Women practiced and performed music at home, or sometimes taught small classes, but this was often with other women. Musical ability was a virtue of noble women that
Hildegard’s music is based exclusively on sacred themes and texts, many of which are drawn from her own visions and premonitions. In the middle ages when Hildegard was composing, the accepted style was monophonic, and chant like. Melismas, or unmeasured ornamental notes, were not common practice at the time and neither was parallel organum, a composition and performance practice of singing the same melody but at a parallel fifth or octave, the natural consonances. Hildegard’s music deviated from her contemporaries’ norms in the respect of creating unique melodies rather than drawing from plainchant. Refer to examples 1 and 2 to compare Hildegard von Bingen’s Closing Chorus from her sacred music, drama Ordo virtuitum, In principio omnes and an anonymous composer’s Puer natu: Quem queritis in prespre, a liturgical drama written in the late tenth century. While the two pieces have some similarities, such as the use of melismas, but one can notice that In principio omnes contains much longer melismas which bring out the meaning of the text by emphasizing syllables, much like common modern choral practice. Hildegard’s piece also has a much wider range of pitches, owing to the fact that almost all of her compositions were written for the other nuns in the convent. Another point, which is not inherently obvious from the text, is that Hildegard often wrote