The seven surviving printed collections of Strozzi’s vocal music (out of eight) have been well enough studied for their musical contents, but less so as bibliographical objects in the context of production methods that were increasingly ill-suited to the repertory in terms of format and typography. When viewed in this light, some of them are very odd indeed. Extreme examples are her opp. 5 (1655) and 8 (1664), which must have undergone some significant intervention during the printing process itself, chiefly – I suggest – because in each case, Strozzi identified a dedicatee in midstream, and changed her plans accordingly. My broader point is that any music print demands close examination in terms both of how it was put together, and of what it might reveal about the (now lost) manuscript sources on which it was based. But in Strozzi’s case, this also raises questions about her intentions in printing her music in the first place.

At least since Ellen Rosand’s foundational work on Barbara Strozzi, scholars have recognized both the libertine environment of Strozzi’s upbringing and the sensual, even erotic character of much of her music. While that eroticism is usually portrayed as heterosexual, I draw attention in this article to a handful of pieces whose same-sex orientation has largely been overlooked. In Eraclito amoroso and La fanciuletta semplice (both from opus 2), and, perhaps most strikingly, the Sonetto that launches opus 1, such desire emerges not only from the poetry Strozzi selected, but also from her treatment of that poetry. Of course, non-heteronormative expressions of sexual attraction were not so unusual in contemporary Venice. Same-sex activity was considered a facet of profligate sexual desire generally, and it appeared often on the operatic stage. I highlight these particular works, however, as especially provocative examples of Strozzi cultivating the eroticized image that her father seems to have intended for her.

This chapter discusses the standards of form Price established in her Piano Concerto, Violin Concerto No. 1 in D Major, and her chamber works created through incorporation of African American forms, procedures, and harmonies. Contextualized within what the author calls New Negro modernism, Price’s concertos and chamber works reinforce our understanding of her style and introduce us to her unique approach to conversational balance, form, virtuosity, and orchestration within these genres.

Nicolò Fontei was one of two teachers of Barbara Strozzi. He settled in Venice, a thirty-year-old priest, in 1634 and quickly became associated with Barbara Strozzi and her father Giulio. At Venice he published sacred music and collaborated in staging an opera, Sidonio e Dorisbe (1642). He also issued three books of secular music, Bizzarrie poetiche poste in musica, thefirst (1635) with texts wholly by Giulio Strozzi, the second (1636) with texts partly by him, and both for the use of Barbara Strozzi. The first book can be seen as a progressive series of studies in vocal technique, music theory and composition for the young singer-composer. Music of the second and third books may have been performed at meetings of the Accademia degli Unisoni. One dialogue, “Lilla, se amor non fugga” (1639) reflects the subject of a debate held by the Unisoni on the relative powers of tears and song to produce love.

During the 1930s and 1940s, the Black press provided some of the most detailed accounts of Florence Price’s compositional activity. The Black press presented a counterinstitution to mainstream media and, as such, reported on Price with the awareness that her accomplishments would be experienced vicariously through a readership that encompassed much of the nation’s Black demographic. In comparison, coverage of Price’s work in the white-authored press is less extensive, and often superficial in tone – though it, too, offers crucial information about Price’s career. This chapter charts the relationship between Price and the Black press across multiple contexts, from her childhood in Little Rock through the apex of her compositional career to the final years of her life. In doing so, it highlights a perpetual tug-of-war that emerges in her critical reception: namely, a discourse that concomitantly exceptionalizes and de-exceptionalizes Price, emphasizing her distinctiveness as much as her embeddedness within Black institutional life.

This chapter offers a speculative account of Barbara Strozzi’s singing, her repertory, her vocal technique, and the ways in which her physical experience as a singer served as a catalyst for some of the most original features of her compositions. After noting the similarities between Giulio Strozzi’s glowing descriptions of Anna Renzi’s singing and his daughter’s compositions, I examine the two highly virtuosic pieces in Opus 2 dedicated to the soprano castrato Adam Franckh that reveal by comparison the special way in which Strozzi likely composed for her own voice—syllabic passages in the lower register, melismatic writing in the middle voice and upper middle voice with easy transitions from one to another register. Furthermore, I argue that her composition was inseparable from her physical experiences as a singer and captures something of the pleasurable sensations that she must have experienced as she explored the full potential of her own instrument.

This chapter examines the life, movement, and works of Margherita Costa, a professional singer and one of Italy’s most prolific women writers. With Barbara Strozzi, Costa shared an occasional city (Venice), a prominent dedicatee (Vittoria della Rovere, Grand Duchess of Tuscany), and several poetic themes, including that of the bella donna, a trope of Baroque Marinist verse. Found primarily in her first poetry collection, La chitarra (1638), Costa’s bella donna is not simply a physically alluring woman who articulates and pursues her own desires—already an innovation—but is also a singer. The chapter concludes by considering three examples of musically centered poems in the volume: erotically charged verse to a Venetian noblewoman, complaints to a negligent lover who demands her song, and humorous poems regarding the gift of an ugly, out-of-tune harpsichord.

This chapter focuses on Price’s art songs and their biographical resonances. Brought into focus are settings of texts by poets such as Paul Laurence Dunbar (1872–1906), Georgia Douglas Johnson (1880–1966), and Langston Hughes (1901–1967). Dunbar inspired numerous early twentieth-century composers of African descent, including Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Harry T. Burleigh, Will Marion Cook, R. Nathaniel Dett, Nora Holt, and William Grant Still. Hughes’s and Douglas’s poetry became a source of inspiration for new generations of Black composers during the Black Renaissance era of the interwar period. Price joins a long list of esteemed composers who engaged with a Black literary canon in their vocal works. Furthermore, Price’s, her predecessors’, and her peers’ settings of Black poetry continued trends in German Romanticism that explored the marriage of music and poetry and positioned this union as a vehicle for national expression and spiritual transcendence. With these settings, Price therefore worked toward a consolidation of a Black aesthetic in the classical solo voice traditions – one that told a great deal of her own story, too.

Barbara Strozzi’s Opus 1 (1644), composed to poetry by Giulio Strozzi, comprises madrigals of two to five voices, so that it stands apart from all of her other works, largely written for one or two voices. While many of the themes in the book follow the work of Barbara’s predecessors and contemporaries, with poems of love, both requited and unrequited, some of the texts refer to old age and the fleetingness of life. In this chapter I suggest that the book represents, in part, an homage to the recently deceased maestro di capella, Claudio Monteverdi (1568-1643). Aside from nods to “la vecchiezza,” there is the transformation of Strozzi’s and Monteverdi’s “Gira il nemico” from Book 8 into a lament of old age, along with references to the master’s Orfeo and to the composer’s last publication, Selva morale e spirituale.

In 2009, numerous manuscripts, previously thought to be lost, were rediscovered in what was once Florence Price’s summer home. The rediscovery narrative that followed, especially in white mainstream media discourse in the United States, focused more on the rediscovery of Price herself, rather than on the rediscovery of her manuscripts. Not only did this distort Price’s meaning to a modern-day, mainstream audience; it also erased the scholarly and archival efforts of practitioners, which can be dated back to the era of Price’s activity. Black classical communities in the United States kept Price’s musical legacy alive through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. This chapter therefore asks: How do we listen to Price today? The Price archives, the narratives of community embedded in her musical manuscripts, and the ensuing recovery work emerge as important factors in this new era of Price scholarship.

The musicological literature has tended to focus on Giulio Strozzi’s career as a librettist, and on his participation in three academies, Ordinati in Rome, and the Incogniti, and its musical offshoot, the Unisoni, in Venice. In this chapter I discuss two biographies published about Strozzi during his lifetime, one of them quite well known (present in the Le Glorie de gli Incogniti), the other one less so (from Gian Vittorio Rossi’s Pinacotheca Imaginum Illustrium). I will highlight the means by which these biographies nuance Strozzi’s time before he became one of Venice’s most noted librettists. I offer new insight into Strozzi’s time in Rome (circa 1601–1615), and suggest that, contrary to his published Incogniti biography, he most likely never earned a degree in law from the University of Pisa.