from Part II - Highlighting Women Composers before 1750
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 May 2024
Musical composition in the Middle Ages involved many processes far removed from what is understood to constitute the subject in the twenty-first century. Whether one considers men or women in the medieval period, it makes the greatest sense to speak about musical production across a broad spectrum of activities including: singing within communities; teaching and learning music (most often through singing); copying and/or commissioning musical, theoretical, and liturgical texts; setting preexisting pieces with new texts (the most common compositional process in Western Europe); recombining older musical materials in new ways; adapting new music or texts (or both) to preexisting circumstances; and lastly introducing completely new pieces or bits of pieces, usually within the context of preexisting materials.1 Scholars have known for decades that women had agency in all these categories; each of them required musical knowledge and creativity.2
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