Musica Secreta
UK musical group
Musica Secreta is a British vocal ensemble that was founded in 1991 by soprano Deborah Roberts to explore music written by and for women in the 16th and 17th centuries. In 2000, musicologist Laurie Stras joined the ensemble as a co-director. The group has made several award-winning albums. They collaborated with novelist Sarah Dunant in a musical dramatization of Dunant's novel Sacred Hearts which ran between 2009 and 2012.
Their album Lucrezia Borgia's Daughter (2017) is a recording of the earliest known published music intended for performance by nuns. The recording features motets printed in the anonymous Musica quinque vocum motteta materna lingua vocata printed in 1543; some may have been written by Eleonora d'Este, the only surviving daughter of Lucrezia Borgia and Alfonso I d'Este, Duke of Ferrara.
Members
The original members of the group were Roberts, Tessa Bonner, Mary Nichols, and harpsichordist John Toll.
Group members have sung with the Tallis Scholars, the Consort of Musicke, The Sixteen, I Fagiolini, Tenebrae, and Magnificat. Collaborators have included Suzie LeBlanc (The Secret Music of Luzzasco Luzzaschi), Emily Van Evera (Dangerous Graces), Catherine King (Songs of Ecstasy and Devotion, Dialogues with Heaven, Dangerous Graces), and Clare Wilkinson (Sacred Hearts, Secret Music). Featured instrumentalists include Paula Chateauneuf, David Miller and Lynda Sayce (lute, theorbo, and chitarrone); Frances Kelly (harp); Mark Levy and Kinga Gáborjáni (viol); Matthew Halls and Nicholas Parle (organ and harpsichord).
“Musica Secreta” enters the record as uK musical group. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Musica, Secreta and musical can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q28407029. VIAF identifies the subject as 151424268. The Library of Congress control number is n94023953. None of the 2 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1991, 2000, 2009 and 2012.
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This entry incorporates text from “Musica Secreta” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.