When Professor Laurie Stras WhatsApped me to say she had incredible news to share, that she couldn’t contain her excitement and that I had to call her asap, it was early 2021 and the musical landscape, present and future, mid-pandemic restrictions, post-Brexit…was looking bleak. I was at a particularly gloomy service station crossing Europe on a coach, where I was being refused entry into the only food outlet because my British vaccination certificate apparently ‘didn’t count’. As Laurie described the momentous discovery she had made – the location of Italian composer Maddalena Casulana’s lost alto partbook for her five-voice madrigals – motivation and purpose started to return as the significance of this collaborative project dawned on me.

The missing alto partbook had found its way to Moscow after disappearing from the Gdańsk Library of the Polish Academy of Sciences during the Second World War. I was used to Laurie making fantastic discoveries, unmasking ‘anonymous composers’ and locating missing music, through working for her ensemble Musica Secreta. But this discovery seemed extra special and she was inviting my ensemble Fieri Consort to bring it to life. As musicians, working with musicologists results in broader understanding for both performers and audiences, creating cultural bridges for everyone involved.

It has been a privilege to record the five-voice madrigals of Maddalena Casulana (1544-90). Being the first female composer to publish under her own name magnifies the importance of preserving these particular compositions showcasing her impressive musical skill. But what’s the relevance of this music, published 441 years ago, to our musical present and future?

Perhaps I feel particularly connected to her as a professional female musician. Historical role models like Casulana ground us to our own culture and traditions. Her successes become something on which we in turn build and develop to become a baton to pass on to the next generations.

Her voice and creativity is now immortalised, not just within her own compositions but through all the musicians who have taken inspiration from her. Humans long to leave a legacy, something to be remembered for, to have a significance in our long chain of cultural traditions. But the genre of early music isn’t just about recording the past or trying to recreate a lost culture. It’s about stimulating creativity and expanding into the future.

Our identities are wrapped in memory. Music is perhaps the most living, ‘present’ expression of our identities. Through music and in this case, particularly songs, language, stories and people are kept alive. By performing Casulana’s music, we’re preserving the traditions, both linguistic and melodic, that existed before her, which she herself was recreating.

Though intangible, music has been preserved through the centuries, initially by oral transmission, next the development of notation, followed by the use of printing presses, and eventually through recordings. The desire to preserve one’s culture has always been strong. But all of this preservation would be futile without the listeners. Throughout history, it’s the listeners who have made music a living art. It can never only exist in the past. Performers are influenced by their contemporary audience, it’s a two-way act of creativity. The sculptor Anthony Gormley expressed this revelation which seems to have given his creativity purpose: ‘Something I have made becomes part of someone else’s experience. I can contribute to the world.’ By preserving this music, both we and it become inspiration for further creativity in the future.

‘Music has a great power’, as Oliver Sachs states in the preface to his book Musicophilia. Through music, emotions can be communicated, remembered across generations, bypassing language and cultural barriers and even travelling between species.

We owe it to Maddalena Casulana to bring her music into the present and by recording it and publishing a modern score for further live performances, sending it into the future, enriching and broadening the repertoire of music available to the listener. So we are delighted that this project has been shortlisted by the European Early Music Network (REMA) for an award in the heritage category.

Hannah Ely is a soprano and founding member of award-winning vocal group Fieri Consort. Their album – ‘The Excellence of Women’ – featuring music by Casulana and Strozzi is released on May 3, 2024 on Fieri Records: fiericonsort.co.uk