From the Boston Globe: From the convents: Music of the nuns.
It sounds like the plot of a children's story: Musicians in small towns are forbidden to play, banned from public view, and kept locked away from society. But they continue to write and perform. So the townspeople build halls around the musician's quarters, where they listen to this wondrous sound through holes in the thick stone walls.
But this is no made-up tale. This was life for nuns in 16th-century Italy when the Catholic Church shut down its open convents in an act known as clausura.
"In effect, they were jailed for life," said Amelia LeClair of Newton. Among the cloister rules issued from Rome was a prohibition of music, which prior to clausura had thrived in the convents. Most towns, however, took this edict with a wink.
"The towns in Italy that housed these convents were very proud of their nuns because they were composing beautiful music," LeClair said. "So they built churches around the cloisters so that the nuns could stay in the cloister, but the people could come and hear them in what they called the chiesa exteriore [the exterior church]. They built a whole building where the public could come and sit comfortably and listen through a hole in the wall to their singing and playing." [continue]
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Capella Clausura