Cappella Clausura: From One Quarantine To Another

By Celina Colby

Cappella Clausura is a Newton-based vocal ensemble that performs music by female composers from the ninth century through today. Clausura recently released a video performance of “Magnificat,” a 1650s composition by Donna Chiara Margarita Cozzolani. The piece is not only gorgeous; it’s extremely relevant to the current state of Brookliners. Cozzolani was a cloistered nun, experiencing her own kind of quarantine four hundred years before ours.

“I chose that piece because it’s just one of the most extraordinary pieces by a woman composer that I could think of,” says director Amelia LeClair. LeClair founded Clausura to highlight the female composers that are often left behind in history and contemporary performances. “It was important to me because I was a composer who had no role models,” she says. “And I was determined that that wouldn’t happen to anyone else.”

Like Cozzolani’s life under the habit, the creation of “Magnificat” was no small commitment. LeClair began the process in March in partnership with videographer Christopher Pitts. She recorded herself silently conducting the piece. That video was woven together with a recording of Theorbo player Catherine Liddell, who played the song’s bass line and harmony that would serve as a melodic guidepost for the singers.

Each singer, all 17 of them working on a volunteer basis for the love of the music, recorded themselves singing to that conduction and melody. Everything was compiled together into one video, which music lovers can currently watch on the Clausura website. The music is interwoven with images of Cozzolani and archival footage of the Duomo in Milan, which sits next to the convent where Cozzolani was cloistered. The result is as seamless as if each performer was in the recording studio together.

“Women also have creative minds. They’re not so always bogged down with taking care of families that they can’t also make music and write and paint and everything,” says LeClair. “We just sort of assume that men have the agency and the leisure to do these things, and we don’t give women enough credit for being able to do them as well.”

This point is particularly resonant during the COVID-19 pandemic. Women grapple with additional domestic responsibilities such as children learning remotely and disproportionately have to leave their jobs to attend to these needs. Despite these inequities, quarantine art has flourished from female artists all over Greater Boston, including LeClair.

“Magnificat” is available for free at www.clausura.org and will be for the foreseeable future.

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