This album presents arrangements from the earliest surviving collection of sonatas written by a woman. That woman is Isabella Leonarda (1620-1704), an Italian nun who lived a long and productive life at her convent in Novara, Italy. As the main music teacher in the convent, she was tasked with overseeing, and often personally delivering, the music instruction to the more junior nuns, including writing music for them to play and sing.

Her musical work came in addition to the other duties in the convent expected of a senior sister: administrative, financial, and devotional activities took up much of her time. Yet despite all of this, and as she’s very careful to note in the introduction to her Op.16 sonatas, she never let her composing take any time away from her other duties.

Despite living in a convent, Leonarda was not in complete isolation either physically or culturally. The Op.16 sonatas, published in 1683, show a strong stylistic similarity to Corelli’s trio sonatas, Op.1, published two years earlier, and with which Leonarda was almost certainly familiar.

Her sonatas are dedicated to Federico Caccia, a Novarese nobleman and lawyer whose star was on the rise: ten years after the publication of these sonatas he would become the Archbishop of Milan. Leonarda arranged for the publication of these sonatas to raise money for the convent; by dedicating her sonatas to Caccia, she was making a savvy bid for more patronage.

From what limited evidence that we have of Leonarda’s life, a picture emerges of a woman whose career balanced piety and pragmatism, musical craft and managerial skill. While the structures through which she moved are no longer familiar to most, the shrewdness with which she promoted her music and her convent are both familiar and admirable.

In this album we want to help revitalise Leonarda’s standing in early Baroque music by presenting her music in a modern context. This album combines arrangements of three of the Op.16 sonatas, four entirely new pieces, and bridging the gap, a modern ‘reflection’ on each of those three sonatas. These reflections borrow material from a given sonata but filter it through a new sonic lens, focusing and amplifying a single component. 

Ensemble Renard are similarly interested in filtering music through a new sonic lens. In an ensemble with as many timbral colours as a wind quintet (and for which the original repertoire starts fairly recently), playing arrangements of old music allows us to engage with the past through a series of playful counterfactuals: what if Leonarda had written for wind quintet? What are the expressive possibilities of a timbral shift?

In addition to Leonarda’s music and the small responses to it, In the Room presents four new pieces, each in their own way an interpretation of meditation and solitude. Georgia Denham’s ‘legs, bodies, arms’ imagines the transcendent peace of going for an early morning row. Geoffrey King’s ‘rare phases of flow’ takes its name from a passage in Sara Baume’s book handiwork about the intermittent periods of fast progress in any creative endeavour. Jon Paul Mayse’s The Invention of Oil recreates the quiet, forgotten sounds that must have accompanied Jan van Eyck’s development of oil painting in the 15th century. David Nunn’s lockwood is music for a solitary walk on the Walthamstow Marshes during lockdown. All of this music was written in 2020 and 2021; just as Leonarda was largely confined and writing for a small group of close collaborators, so too did we.