Barbara Strozzi’s Opus 3 stands apart from her other works by virtue of its mysterious dedication to the “Ignotae Deae”—a feminized version of the motto “Ignoto Deo”— that the Accademia degli Incogniti had borrowed from St. Paul’s sermon to the Athenians. Although seemingly affirming Strozzi’s links to the Incogniti, the enigmatic dedication also speaks to Strozzi’s ability in her music—both in this volume and elsewhere in her oeuvre—to dissimilate: to use music as means not of expressing her feelings but hiding them from her listeners. This hypothesis is born out in an overview of the volume’s organization, her choice of poems, and treatment of the poems that continually emphasize deception and deceit, where the musical setting often contradicts or even undermines the poem. In the end Strozzi herself emerges as the Unknown Goddess, who neutralizes even seemingly misogynist poems with deft humor, irony, always keeping her mask firmly in place.

Florence Price’s contributions to the keyboard literature range from pedagogical works for beginners, many of which she composed for her own students, to expansive multi-movement pieces that were written with the concert musician in mind. In addition to their varying levels of difficulty, variety also comes in the form of their stylistic influences. African American folk idioms are prevalent, as are the sound worlds of nineteenth century Romanticism and early twentieth-century chromatic experimentalism. As this chapter shows, Price’s keyboard music additionally sheds light on the influence of the publishing industry and the market for these works. Ultimately, however, Price’s keyboard output provides a window into her impetus as an educator and composer, and reveals Price the pianist and organist who frequently programmed her unpublished works in her own recitals and played for pleasure.

Florence Price’s music expands the conversation around what musical analysis means for composers on the canonical fringes who draw upon influences outside a Western art music framework. This chapter recognizes the limitations of conventional Western music analysis in studies of Price’s music and suggests other modes of analytic inquiry that actively engage with interdisciplinary and intersectional resources. This chapter asks: What would it mean to hear and analyze Florence Price’s music intersectionally? What follows are case studies around select art songs that exemplify modes of assessing her compositions with serious analytical nuance, as well as hearing music through and with the composer. In addition to exploring greater possibilities for the analysis of Price’s music, this chapter confronts the detrimental impact of the exceptionalist narrative in discussions of her compositional ideas, stylistic sources, and career trajectory.

Had Giulio Strozzi not recognized Barbara as his daughter, she might have led an entirely different life. Like so many other illegitimate children, she could have grown up within one of Venice’s charitable institutions. This chapter explores the path not taken – the kind of opportunities available to musically talented girls who were not accepted by their family but instead abandoned at the foundling home called the Ospedale della Pietà. Documentation regarding the Ospedale’s musicians reveals the influences of governing patrician men and surrounding social conditions on these orphaned women’s musical activities. Despite strict regulation of women’s public performance, these nonelite female musicians developed successful lifelong musical careers and their own financial autonomy, somewhat comparable to Barbara Strozzi’s, by means of their musical skills, public popularity, and the resultant patronage.

Antonia Padoani Bembo and Barbara Strozzi both studied music with Francesco Cavalli. Bembo’s career apparently began when she was a young singer in Cavalli’s La Calisto and it lasted into her 70s, when she completed, among other compositions, a five-act opera and motets based on the complete penitential psalms. This chapter lists the pieces from her first book, Produzioni armoniche, that may have been composed during the years that she lived in Venice (c. 1640–77), when perhaps she came under the influence of Barbara Strozzi. All of Bembo’s manuscripts are preserved at the Paris Bibliothèque nationale and date from the years that she lived in France (1677–c.1720). In addition to the aforementioned works, these include sacred and secular music for three- and five-voice choir with accompaniment. In Paris, Bembo received support from King Louis XIV to live in a women’s community known as the “Petite Union Chrétienne.”

This essay reviews some of the music that Barbara Strozzi may have heard in Venetian churches and homes or sung and studied with her teachers, Nicolò Fontei and Francesco Cavalli. It introduces the terms “madrigal,” “aria,” “motet,” and “cantata” and considers the importance of guitar accompaniment in determining changes in aria styles in the 1620s and 1630s. In particular, I trace the use of refrains in both strophic arias and more complex through-composed pieces, a technique that was to prove important in the music of Strozzi’s Op. 1 (1644). Finally, I speculate on the identity of the lover Tirsi in the second of Strozzi’s Madrigali.

“My Soul’s Been Anchored in the Lord” (1937) is one of Price’s most well-known concert spirituals due to Marian Anderson’s historic performance of the piece on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial in 1939. Its continued inclusion in programs, especially by African American concert singers (such as Leontyne Price and Roberta Alexander, for example), has helped secure the work as an important contribution to the repertory of American art song. However, the song’s significance extends beyond its high-profile performances and sheds light on the significant legacy of the concert spiritual genre. This chapter’s analysis of several concert spirituals by Price reflects her embrace of and impact on this genre’s conventions and musical legacy.

Ellen Rosand provides an overview of Strozzi in the fifty years since her groundbreaking article, “Barbara Strozzi, virtuossisima cantatrice: The Composer’s Voice” was published in the Journal of the American Musicological Society in 1976. In it she explores the many performances and recordings of Strozzi’s music, discoveries about Strozzi’s life, discussion of her music, the iconography associated with the composer (in particular the portrait by Bernardo Strozzi that Ellen and David Rosand identified), as well as her image in popular literature, on radio and in film, all of which have given us not only a much richer and fuller sense of who she was, but a greater appreciation of her the quality of her music.

As social and economic actors, women in early modern Italian city states enjoyed clear legal rights. Their actions, however, needed to be constantly negotiated with their kinship ties, since their wealth was basically transmitted from dowries and inheritance, both mechanisms implying some degree of mediation and compromise, as well as opportunities and limitations. Venetian laws and customs tended to protect and defend women’s property rights, and courts embraced the general principle of considering women and their husbands as separate financial entities even when they were married, thus permitting women to take advantage of the many opportunities to invest their wealth. Barbara Strozzi offers a precious case study: her economic independence, inherited but also hard-won and defended, was built on all the financial opportunities the still rich Venetian economy offered.

This essay explores the use and eventual abandonment of two pitch aggregates – canto per bemolle (signature of a single flat) and canto per bequadro (void signature) – in Barbara Strozzi’s music. Rooted in the two cantus of Guidonian pedagogy, Strozzi’s practice distinguished tonalities according to their bemolle or bequadro signatures, which signaled distinct pitch collections, cadence points, and text affects that she associated with tonal flatness or sharpness. Between the 1640s and 1660s, Strozzi expanded her notated key signatures while maintaining the distinction between flatness and sharpness, but her tonal style never settled into the norms of functional tonality, such as clear tonic/dominant and major/minor oppositions. We must therefore understand Strozzi’s tonal practice as complete and coherent on its own terms, and not as a transition between Renaissance modes and eighteenth-century keys. In doing so, we perceive her flair for vivid, dramatic, and even bizarre text-expressive effects according to the tonal system of her era.

The late Rae Linda Brown was instrumental in taking Florence Price scholarship to new heights. She worked as part of a dedicated cohort of Price scholars and performers (such as Mildred Denby Green, Barbara Garvey Jackson, and Althea Waites) to bring the life and music of Price to wider audiences, in and outside of academia. This chapter positions Brown as an important link between the earlier efforts of New Negro era musicologists who documented Price’s outputs during the composer’s lifetime, the post–civil rights era musicologists who contextualized Price and her contemporaries in a deeper social history of Black American music, and the twenty-first-century interventions as represented in this companion. This chapter delves into Brown’s journey to tell Price’s story, encompassing her first encounters with Price’s music as a student at Yale and her monumental efforts to subsequently archive, publish, and publicize the details of Price’s groundbreaking story. In this chapter, the centrality of several library collections, including those at the University of Arkansas, come to the fore.

What does it look like for new research to remain in dialogue with the past; to express evolving knowledge in a creative duet with the intellectual genealogies undergirding these paths; to evince a melting pot of inspiration over siloed discourses? These are the questions that guide this introductory chapter to The Cambridge Companion to Florence B. Price. Beginning with the story of Price’s plea for her music to have an audience with the Boston Symphony’s Serge Koussevitzky and segueing into the deeper history of Black classical music community building in which Price’s music and memory was upheld, this chapter lays out priorities that must inform the twenty-first-century landscape of Price scholarship.

This essay looks at the artistic patronage of the Strozzis and Widmanns, who were connected not only through commerce and culture, but also through the relationship between Giovanni Paolo Widmann and Barbara Strozzi. Both Giulio and Barbara, as well as various members of the Widmann family, were painted by the leading artists active in Venice at that time, such as Tiberio Tinelli, Bernardo Strozzi (well known as Il Prete Genovese) and Nicolas Régnier. Through the surviving documents and works of art, the dense intertwining of painting, music and poetry emerges, fostered by the Accademia degli Incogniti, the most famous literary circle flourishing in Venice in the seventeenth century, and to which Barbara and Giulio Strozzi and the abovementioned artists were connected. Furthermore,the essay sheds new light on the genre of the and the role it plays in celebrating the individual’s features and perpetuating personal memory.