Cappella Clausura

Cappella Clausura promotes the performance of music created by women, which has often languished unheard. Our repertoire ranges from cloistered nuns of the 9th century to an increasingly diverse group of contemporary women composers. 

Over the past 17 years, Cappella Clausura has performed an ever-widening repertoire for enthusiastic audiences in concert halls and churches, as well as academic and virtual settings. Our concerts have included music by Medieval, Renaissance, Baroque, Classical, Romantic, and Contemporary composers. We have also been privileged to have had compositions written especially for us by a growing number of living composers. 

Cappella Clausura’s name was inspired by the many female composers imprisoned in the cloisters (“in clausura”) of 17th century Italy. During this period, roughly 56% of patrician daughters disappeared into convents. Our name continues to serve as a metaphor for the cultural obstacles faced by women composers throughout history, and still in the present day. 

In 2017 Cappella Clausura won Chorus America’s ASCAP/AliceParker award for adventurous programming. Cappella Clausura has been featured frequently in the Boston Globe and other local news outlets.

In addition to releasing our own recordings, Cappella Clausura is a PARMA artist, with two other recordings now available on the Navona label: our 2016 recording of Hilary Tann’s brilliant Exultet Terra and Patricia Van Ness’s luminous Birds of the Psalms, released November 2017.

The core of the ensemble is eight-to-sixteen professional vocalists who perform a cappella, as well as with instruments appropriate to the repertoire. Both our singers and players are drawn from Boston’s superb pool of accomplished professionals who perform widely as soloists and ensemble musicians in Greater Boston and beyond.