Chiara Margarita Cozzolani

about

Chiara Margarita Cozzolani (27 November 1602 – ca. 1676–1678), was a Baroque music composer, singer and Benedictine nun. She spent her adult life cloistered in the convent of Santa Radegonda, Milan, where she became abbess and stopped composing. More than a dozen cloistered women published sacred music in seventeenth-century Italy. The youngest daughter born into a wealthy merchant family in Milan, Italy, Margarita Cozzolani entered the convent and took her vows in 1620. She added "Chiara" as her religious name. Her writings are very prolific, with some stylistic characteristics being the usage of sequences and switching modes. The duets and solos in her 1642 Concerti Sacri had followed suit in the Lombard style. Her four musical opere were published between 1640 and 1650, which is the date of her Vespers, perhaps her best-known single work. There is also a Paschal Mass. Her first publication, Primavera di fiori musicali, is lost.In the convent of Santa Radegonda, the nuns sang during major religious feast days. This drew a great deal of attention from the outside world. As abbess of Santa Radegonda, Cozzolani defended the nuns' music, which came under attack from Archbishop Alfonso Litta, who wanted to reform the convent by limiting the nuns' practice of music and other contact with the outside world. The archbishop's qualms could not have been reassured by the ecstatic report of Filippo Picinelli, in Ateneo dei letterati milanesi (Milan, 1670) who found that "the nuns of

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albums

Chiara Margarita Cozzolani: Marienvesper

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Cozzolani: Vespro

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Cozzolani: Complete Works, Vol. 1 - Salmi a Otto Voci Concertati (1650)

Cozzolani: I Vespiri Natalizi

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Cozzolani: Complete Works, Vol. 2 (Concerti Sacri)

Cozzolani: Easter Mass

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Cozzolani: Messa Paschale

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Angels & Shepherds: A 17th Century Christmas

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Dialogues with Heaven (Motets)

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Dixit dominus

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Salve, o Regina

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Dialogues with Heaven: motets by Chiara Margarita Cozzolani

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