Musica Secreta's new album for 2025: Ricordanze

Aim: Help us fund our eleventh recording and our second self-release - Ricordanze: a record of love - of music from a sixteenth-century convent.

In October 2025, Musica Secreta will release Ricordanze: a record of love, our deepest exploration yet of the music of the only surviving manuscript of polyphony from a sixteenth-century convent, the Biffoli-Sostegni manuscript, which belonged to San Matteo in Arcetri, the convent near Florence where Suor Maria Celeste Galilei and her sister Suor Arcangela, daughters of Galileo Galilei, lived out their adult lives. The album is a companion to Laurie Stras’s new contribution to the Cambridge Elements in Women in Music series, Music at a Florentine Convent: The Biffoli-Sostegni Manuscript and Suor Maria Celeste Galilei, due for publication in summer 2025. We need your help to get us over the line financially!

the project

For the last ten years, Musica Secreta’s director Prof Laurie Stras has been studying the Biffoli-Sostegni manuscript, MS 27766 of the Library of the Royal Conservatory in Brussels, pursuing its history through the archives of Florence and reconstructing its music with the aid of photographs. The importance of this fragile treasure, soon due to emerge from ten years of restoration, was unrecognised for the first hundred years at the conservatory library.  However, thanks to Laurie’s research, we now know it as the only manuscript collection of polyphony from the sixteenth century with a secure provenance in an identifiable female convent: San Matteo in Arcetri, a modest house of Poor Clares nestled in the hills about a mile south of Florence.

In 1560, the Florentine composer and music copyist Fra Antonio Moro (or Mori) produced a music manuscript with 169 leaves of paper, bound in leather with the names and family coats of arms of Suor Agnoleta Biffoli and Suor Clemenzia Sostegni embossed on the covers. It contains tiny clues – inscriptions with the women’s initials, miniature portraits of singing nuns – that suggest Agnoleta and Clemenzia were close friends. Laurie discovered that during the 1540s, Agnoleta and Clemenzia became nuns at the convent of San Matteo in Arcetri, a modest house of Poor Clares nestled in the hills about a mile south of Florence. Although we don’t know their dates of birth, we can be sure both women entered the convent while they were still girls: they both lived into the early 1600s. Their manuscript was almost certainly still at the convent when Suor Clemenzia died in 1612, when her place at the convent was taken by Suor Maria Celeste Galilei.

We do not know why the manuscript was made, but its music ranges from complex mass settings to the briefest of litanies, polyphonic psalms and simple songs – music that the nuns of San Matteo could have used throughout the year and in many kinds of formal and informal worship and devotion. Wanting to explore all these different modes of music-making, we have chosen to record items that might not normally feature on commercial albums, but that reflect the way in which music permeated almost every waking hour of a sixteenth-century choir nun.

Followers of Musica Secreta may be familiar with the Biffoli-Sostegni manuscript through a handful of works on our previous two albums, From Darkness Into Light: (Obsidian, 2019) and Mother, Sister, Daughter (Lucky Music, 2022).  The new album, Ricordanze, is a double album, with over 100 minutes of music from the manuscript, including its two important settings of the Mass Ordinary, the Messa sopra Recordare Virgo Mater in four voices, and the Messa sopra Je le larray in three voices, as well as psalms, antiphons, litanies, a Magnificat, and devotional songs.  

We have used a range of performance approaches on this album that represent the choices available to convent without substantial wealth: unaccompanied solo voices; unaccompanied two voices per part; voices with organ; voices with viol; voices with organ and viol; and voices with lute. 

self-release

Releasing recordings is an expensive undertaking for most classical/early music ensembles. Only a small proportion, if any, of production costs are funded by record companies so most of the cost lands on the artists themselves. Streaming and the decline of physical CD sales have made the economics of recording even more complicated, with ever less return through royalties reaching us. We have decided that the best way for us to maintain control over our “investment” is to release the album ourselves – using online resources for a digital release and distributing physical CDs only through our website and at concerts. 

what money we need, and how we will spend it

We were very fortunate to have received partial funding towards the recording of the album via Laurie’s 2023-24 Emeritus Fellowship from the Leverhulme Trust, but the recording itself is not the full cost of releasing an album. Although we’ve self-funded from our reserves, we still need around £5000 to help us cover the costs of the videos, album design and manufacture, and promotion. 

who we are

Musica Secreta is the most established female-voice early music ensemble in the UK.  For over thirty years, we have performed, taught, and recorded music written by and for women from the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries. We have made ten CDs, four of which are of music exclusively by historic women composers (Barbara Strozzi, Lucrezia Vizzana, Margarita Cozzolani, Leonora d’Este). All of our recordings have received critical acclaim, including a nomination for Gramophone’s  2020 Early Music award, and a place in the top albums for 2022 from the New Yorker and the New York Times.

Our musicians, all women, have performed with major ensembles including the Tallis Scholars, The Sixteen, Tenebrae, Magnificat, Siglo d’Oro, Ensemble Plus Ultra, the BBC Singers, Joglaresa, Voces8, and the Rose Consort. Our director Laurie Stras is a leader in discovering and promoting the work of historic women composers and musicians. She is Professor Emerita of Music at the University of Southampton. 

some practical notes

UK supporters: many of these rewards qualify for Gift Aid, so if you pay tax at least at the basic rate, you can choose to check the Gift Aid box - this makes your donation worth an additional 25% to us.

Delivery for physical rewards: We only use services that provide tracking for your package. UK delivery is included in the reward donation. If your reward requires overseas delivery, you can choose to add to your donation to help us cover the cost. 

Funding method

Keep what you raise – this project will receive all pledges made by 25th August 2025 at 5:00pm