ABSTRACT
The author begins by affirming the metaphor: where LaMay writes of many-headed melodies, the threatening proliferation of different paths through musical space. Toward the beginning of her introduction, Thomasin LaMay imagines for readers that such exceptional women musicians as Francesca Caccini and Barbara Strozzi might seem different if people knew them not through the documents, institutions and knowledges by which generations of androcentric music histories have defined the musical world that was important to men in early modern Europe, but instead through an understanding of a larger musical culture which included women. On the fifteenth day of their imaginary dialogue, Bronzini's interlocutors turned the full force of their attention to the subject of music. At twenty-three pages, Francesca Caccini's biographical sketch is the longest Bronzini devoted to a woman musician. Most of Bronzini's account confirms facts about Caccini that music historians might already have known or inferred from the androcentric sources that fueled twentieth century historiography.
