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from “polite conversation” to, during the 1560s, “explicitly erotic,” depicting sex happening. 49
LaMay emphasizes the effect of the concerti delle donne, troupes of female madrigal singers,
hired by nobility to perform the sexually charged repertoire for an audience of the duke and his
court, stating that these female performers,
…radically changed [the function of the repertoire] in large part
due to the reversal of who performed and who watched: what had
been gendered ‘male’ became embodied ‘female,’ and this must
have created a real crisis of voice, but also of gender. So I must
ask… how Madalena would have situated herself: performer
(wearer of texts), composer (acting like a man), woman looking for
a body? 50
As LaMay clearly states, because of these gender conflations, both in terms of madrigal texts and
singers and Casulana’s own paradoxical role as female composer, seeking out the ways in which
Casulana encoded gender in her works is both intriguing and daunting. Surely, Casulana was
aware of the gender conflations presented to her, and through her works we see multiple
expressions of her own voice, as she resisted classification as either sexualized body (feminine)
or disembodied mind (masculine), choosing instead to be an embodied mind, so to speak, that
refused to submit the female performers of her music to sexual objectification by their male
spectators.
Laura Macy explains the sexual gratification of the male spectators of the concerti delle
donne. She notes:
49 Ibid, 57.
50 Ibid.
Within the court’s inner sanctum a group of amateur courtiersingers
were gradually replaced by professionals by the musicloving
(but apparently not music-making) duke [of Ferrara]: the
madrigal became a spectator sport. Alfonso II founded an
ensemble of beautiful women to make his wanton words and
19