Barbara Strozzi - Female composer and alleged courtesan

I first heard Barbara Strozzi’s music on Youtube while researching several female composers for my debut album, Voices of Women. I was, and still am, simply captivated by her music’s qualities of expressiveness and emotion.

“Che si puo fare?” comes from one of Barbara Strozzi’s many collections of songs, most of which are composed for lyric soprano voice, which was her voice type.  As a soprano myself, in learning this work I sensed that Barbara Strozzi herself sang this music and composed it to showcase the most beautiful parts of the soprano instrument.  Barbara Strozzi utilizes the range of the voice so effectively, and as a soprano, I have found her music to feel so natural and easy to sing due to its text setting and instinctive phrasing. That’s not to say that different artists can’t make different choices when singing Barbara Strozzi’s music, but so much of the work is done for the singer by the compositional style. It may sound odd, but in the classical vocal music repertoire, it is a rare gift to find music written by a woman soprano.  Some composers may have been boy sopranos in their youth, but not many have been adult sopranos.

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