Slaves, nuns and divas: the Sònore project recovers music made by women

There are the singing slaves, muses of poets and entertainment for men in Al-Andalus around the 10th century. There is María Ladvenant, who started her own musical entertainment company in the 18th century. There is Maria Carbonell, an organist and composer nun from Alcoi, born in 1889, who composed sacred music but also works for band. There is the soprano María Ros, who in 1924 married the tenor Giacomo Lauri-Volpi and left the stage to dedicate herself to training her husband's voice. There is Cora Raga, a mezzo-soprano specialized in zarzuela, a convinced republican, and the first artist to perform the Valencian regional anthem. The musicologist and social educator Isabel Ferrer has tried to rescue all of them from oblivion, who has included them in Sònore Projecta virtual museum of women in Valencian music throughout history.

Ferrer has found the singing slaves, those who sang in the fields, the divas and the nuns throughout years of research. In February 2023, he decided that a website was “an accessible and democratic way of sharing” and on it he poured hundreds of lives, documents, photographs, books and works of art as an invitation to “think about music taking into account “The gender variable takes into account, which always puts women in the background.”

It is not, says Isabel Ferrer, about writing a “feminine history of music”: “That would be like saying that there is a general history of music and another, separate one, of music made by women, and that is not the case.” . But it is about thinking “from another point of view”, about collecting information and establishing links without looking for a feminine universal of music. “Because a singing slave is not the same as a bourgeois woman of the 19th century, and Clara Schumann is not the same as a woman who works in the field,” notes the musicologist.

Projecte Sònore is conceived as an exhibition, and that is why it offers six itineraries through the material that Ferrer has collected. In each of them – Representations, Spheres, Voices, Offices, Territories and Networks – there are not only singers, pianists, composers, but also historical examples that show how women musicians have been talked about, written or painted.

One of the discoveries that have most fascinated Isabel Ferrer is the figure of the singing slaves of the Arab world. “It's hard to imagine what those lives dedicated to music but in captivity would be like,” she says. Later, with the expansion of Christianity, the female voice began to be seen as a danger. “The figure of the siren that diverts the sailor from his path is recovered and women musicians are presumed to have the capacity to deceive, to persuade, to mislead men in their attempt to reach God,” she explains. For this reason, at one of the entrances to Sònore, a ceramic piece represents a mermaid playing a wind instrument. She tempting honest men.

At the same time, in the monasteries, the nuns sing, compose, create and play instruments, as did Sister Margarita del Espíritu Santo Rodríguez, who lived in the convent of Santa Úrsula in Valencia in the 17th century. “She completely learned the solfa, to play the harp with skill, and to compose it with admiration,” her biographers recall in the text recovered by Isabel Ferrer. She never stopped playing until “ultimate illnesses prevented her from moving one hand.” But, also in women's congregations there was censorship and limitations. In a letter from 1403 collected on the Sònore website, King Martin the Human complains that the congregation of nuns in a Valencian monastery sings secular music. In the monasteries, only the divine. Outside, in the field, the earthly: the work songs.

“The problem in the compilation of the oral tradition, of work songs, is that it is poorly recorded until the 20th century,” explains the musicologist, who details that women who worked cleaning, in the fields or in warehouses sang, and there were no repertoires separated by genre. Only from the 1950s onwards did the recordings of ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax, and those that came later, inaugurate an archive of music that today has served, says Ferrer, to recover the tradition.

With the rise of the bourgeoisie in the 19th century, the current concert model and the professionalization of music emerged, and instrumentalists, but especially singers, acquired “great power, even superior to that of men.” “They were subject to the male gaze but they were autonomous and independent in their work, and they were a mirror where other women could look at themselves,” says Isabel Ferrer, who has united the best-known names such as the opera singer Lucrezia Bori with others less known as those of Luisa Fons, who debuted at the age of fifteen in 'El Barbero de Sevilla' and became a star, or Pilar Martí, popular comic soprano and introducer of the skort-trousers scene around 1910.

But women's relationship with music was not limited to singing and theater. As Sònore's documentation states, in the 18th and 19th centuries, women entrepreneurs and show promoters began to emerge, such as María Ladvenant, who formed her own company. “To avoid bad tongues and for logistical ease, it was common for these businesses to be run by married couples, although in many cases, they were the stars, the leaders,” highlights the promoter of the project.

But the most obvious job option for female musicians was teaching. Until the 20th century, “women musicians played in concerts until they got married and then taught classes.” Like María Ros, from diva to private teacher of her husband's tenor. Like María Jordán, one of the first teachers of the pianist José Iturbi. Like Consuelo del Rey, who directed the first musical school for girls in Valencia. In fact, at the beginning of the century, more than half of the teaching staff in Valencian public conservatories was made up of women although, at first, they could only teach piano lessons.

In the Sònore catalogue, which Isabel Ferrer intends to expand over time, there are dozens, hundreds of lives of women who have dedicated themselves, in one way or another, to musical practice, beyond the names that have been most claimed. . “Musical practices are a reflection and simultaneously build day-to-day life,” says its promoter, who believes that Sònore has a lot of life left. “Patriarchy always finds gaps and it will be a work of years, of centuries, until finally the gender variable does not cause us to erase part of the artists from the history of art,” she concludes.

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