Join Musica Spira for a concert featuring Chiara Cozzolani's exquisite Mass for Four Voices and other gems from the Italian Baroque convents

More than half of all Italian women spent their lives in convents in the seventeenth century. Cloistered from the world, these women were often free to pursue artistic and scholarly endeavors at extraordinarily high levels. At least thirteen nuns composed stunningly virtuosic music across the seventeenth century in Italy, and countless more musical women performed these masterpieces behind screens for adoring audiences. At times, the women's music-making was so extraordinary that it attracted the suspicion of church authorities who would then enact various levels of censorship. Despite these restrictions, the musical women in convents found ways to continue perfecting their craft.

The centerpiece of this concert is Chiara Margarita Cozzolani's Mass for Four singers, a stunning work she wrote while living in a Benedictine convent in Milan. The program also features pieces by other seventeenth-century Italian nuns, showcasing the wide range of high-level music making that women achieved in the Baroque period.