Gender and Baroque Music

Authors

  • Suzanne Cusick New York University, New York
  • Silvana Scarinci Federal University of Minas Gerais

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.35699/2317-6377.2009.54484

Keywords:

Baroque Music, Music and Gender Studies, Cortesans, Castrati

Abstract

In 17th- and 18th- century Europe, both musical culture and what anthropologists call the sex/gender system
were important sites for ordinary human beings (not philosophers) to confront and engage with the epistemological and
social anxieties that characterized the age. This paper will explore the myriad relationships of gender and Baroque musical culture, with special emphasis on the most foreign aspects of those relationships—the roles that courtesans, castrati
and their most elite patrons played in ensuring that music-making was a means for both the representation and the
circulation of power and desire.

Author Biographies

  • Suzanne Cusick, New York University, New York

    Suzanne Cusick is Professor of Music at New York University, where she currently coordinates the Graduate Programme in Music. With a Ph.D. in Music from the University of North Carolina (1975) and a BA in Fine Arts from Newcomb College (1969), she has published important works in the following areas: the relationship between music-making, identity and corporeality; feminist approaches to music history and criticism; and studies on homosexuality and music. She will soon be publishing a monograph by the University of Chicago Press on Francesca Caccini, an Italian singer, teacher and composer from the early 17th century. She has received some of the most important international scholarships, such as the Frederick Burkhardt Residential Fellow at Villa I Tatti and a research fellowship at the Harvard University Centre for Italian Renaissance Studies (2001-2002). She was the coordinator of the Gay and Lesbian Study Group of the American Musicological Society and was a member of the editorial board of the association's journal.

  • Silvana Scarinci, Federal University of Minas Gerais

    Silvana Scarinci is a post-doctoral researcher at UFMG, where she dedicates herself to researching and teaching theories and practices related to Baroque music. In 2008 she published the book Safo Novella: a poetics of abandonment in the laments of Barbara Strozzi (Venice 1619-1677), by EDUSP/Algol. The book is accompanied by a CD with Marília Vargas, Luís Otávio Santos, André Cavazotti, Silvana Scarinci and Sérgio Álvares. In 2001, she founded Anima Fortis, a group specialising in music written by women from the Baroque period, which was awarded a prize by the North American association Early Music America in 2002. She has participated in various productions of Baroque opera in Brazil and the United States, including I lavori persi under the direction of Nigel North, presented in 2002 at the Bloomington Early Music Festival, USA; Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda (Nicolau de Figueiredo conducting the Camerata Antiqua of Curitiba) and Monteverdi's L'Orfeo, at the Municipal Theatre of Rio de Janeiro, under the direction of Marcelo Fagerlande. She was the scientific coordinator of the 1st UFMG Early Music Week: Baroque in Context (November 2007) and coordinates the series Música Antiga no Casarão (Campinas, 2008).

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Published

2025-03-26

Issue

No. 20 (2009): General Topics

Section

Articles in Portuguese/Spanish

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How to Cite

“Gender and Baroque Music”. 2025. Per Musi, no. 20 (March): 7-15. https://doi.org/10.35699/2317-6377.2009.54484.