Echoes of Lost Voices: Visual and Textual Evidence of Female Musical Identity c. 1500
Since receiving the School of Music Advisory Board Scholar Award in Sept. 2025, Dr. Hatter has taught a seminar on Women in Music, given three conference presentations and a campus lecture, visited a local high school, and provided a pre-concert talk for Utopia Early Music.
By Jane Hatter, University of Utah School of Music
It has been a productive time for research, teaching and mentorship on female musical identity! This semester I taught my special topics course on “Women in Early Music History,” where my students read widely on the topic of female musicality, gained skills interpreting the information provided in primary sources, and developed methodologies for research. My students produced stellar final papers that represented a wide variety of interests, from contextualizing a few of the music manuscripts produced by Anna Magdalena Bach and violinist Anna Maria (soloist for many of Vivaldi’s concertos) to studies on how super star singers Faustina Bordoni and Vittoria Tesi Tramontini navigated their professional challenges and opportunities. They explored everything from gilded bindings to defamatory illustrated chamber pots. I am hopeful that some of these students will continue their work on these projects under my mentorship, possibly through UROP, conference presentations, or publications. My former undergraduate research assistant, Elise Christian LeMonnier, was admitted to several excellent PhD programs and has accepted a spot in the elite program at UPenn in Art History.
While my research usually progresses more in the summer, in the past 8 months I have given two conference presentations related to my research on these projects—in November at the American Musicological Society in Minneapolis I spoke on personification of the liberal art of music as a woman, in February at the Renaissance Society of America in San Francisco I presented on two manuscripts owned by Florentine girls, and gave another related paper at the Medieval Association of the Pacific conference in March. I have also given a campus lecture in the Fridays with Faculty series, and a pre-concert talk for a musical celebration of the life of Christine de Pizan performed by Utopia Early Music. I was able to secure an Ideals grant that allowed all the students in my Women in Music seminar to attend that concert as well as bringing Dr. Emily Nelson, Utopia’s founding director, into our classroom to provide a guest workshop on creative ways to program music by and for women.
Additionally, I met with AR Editions in November to confirm their support of my approach to an edition of the songbooks owned by Florentine girls. I have completed transcribing half of the pieces, and I am now ready to hire an ensemble of undergraduate singers and a guitarist for a collaborative workshop in the early fall to proofread the parts and make sure that it is accessible and usable. I am looking forward to having more time to focus on this research over the summer and I deeply appreciate the School of Music Advisory Board’s support of my work on female musical identity!