In response to:
Lagoon Tunes from the April 9, 1992 issue
To the Editors:
Robert Craft’s otherwise informative review of H. C. Robbins Landon and John Julius Norwich’s Five Centuries of Music in Venice [NYR, April 9] contained the curious description of Barbara Strozzi as “history’s only renowned female composer.” I wonder on what grounds he makes this judgment. According to Ellen Rosand’s essay in Women Making Music (Illinois, 1986), Strozzi lacked support for her compositional career following the death of her adopted father, and her own death date is unknown; she disappears from history following the publication of her op. 8 Arie in 1664. Compared to the career of say Elisabeth-Claude Jacquet de la Guerre, upon whose death a commemorative medal was struck, “renowned” cannot have meant having “widespread honor and fame” as my dictionary suggests. Strozzi’s compositions are indeed lovely and important works and deserve more attention than they’ve received, but claiming her “history’s only” does a great disservice to the many other female composers before and after Strozzi; Francesca Caccini and Fanny Mendelssohn Hensel come to mind as do Hildegard of Bingen and Ruth Crawford, but the list could go on and on. Although Mr. Craft questions the lack of information on Strozzi provided by Misters Landon and Norwich, he seems to have been as “distracted” by the portrait of a female musician as he claims they were. Again according to Rosand the portrait in question may not be of Barbara Strozzi at all. Mr. Craft’s later reference to this same portrait as a “period pin-up” not only suggests his assumption of the male gaze of his readership (why would I, a female musicologist, buy a work for a pin-up?) but perpetuates the connection between female musicality and sexual promiscuity that dogged Strozzi and her many like-minded and talented sisters and continues to make female creativity in music a suspect act of audacity where nice girls need not apply.