Music Term Papers - Medieval Composer Kassia

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Kassia was born in 810 A.D making her the earliest woman composer for whom there is preserved music. It should be noted that Kassia is not significant because of her gender, but because of her innovative offerings, otherwise, her music would not have been savored in manuscripts, which were copied primarily by male monks.

Kassia in the early 9th century was using the string form of ‘Augustus the Monarch’ in her composition. The sequence is a regular melody form that has been professed to have been a Western invention by the monks of St. Gaul in the middle to late 9th century, but Kassia was using this kind before the mid-9th century. However, Kassia's talent is that she not only uses parallelism in the music, but parallelism of the themes and a parallel romantic rhyming scheme. It can be safely stated because of Kassia's composition, as the perpetuity form was used in both the medieval East as well as the medieval West. In other compositions, Kassia uses a theme and variation form, which is normally, equivalent with great Western composers such as Mozart and Beethoven.
 

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“The Five-stringed Lute and Fivefold Lamp" was composed to pay homage to the Saints Eustratios, Auxentios, Eugenios, Orestes, and Mardarios. Kassia gives a short personification of these five martyrs who were all born into noble families from Cappodocia. “The Five-stringed Lute and Fivefold Lamp" proves the originality and creativity with both text and music that marks Kassia as an amazing poet and composer. What is unusual here is the use of the words that are etymologically associated to the names of these martyrs. Kassia follows the pattern of preceding the name of each martyr with a word in the phrase that is reclaimed from the root of the name.

Her composition displays her talent and originality as a poet and as a composer. Her poetry guides the structure of her musical compositions. Her compositions are far more original than most of her generation'; otherwise, her music might not have been monumental in the Byzantine chronicles of the time. Kassia's music is precise, her texts set syllabically. Her musical inventiveness and wit are proved by the form of her compositions, which often parallels or contrasts with the text; in musical motives that signify and reflect the text and in her poetic play with words. A notable feature of Kassia is her exploration of music hardly ever performed due to inaccessibility. Kassia is only one from thousands of Byzantine and Ancient Greek composers whose names need to progress as a commonplace in the history of Western music.

 

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