As a composer, I am deeply passionate about exploring the intricate connections between music and the world around us. My compositional voice focuses on musically mapping aspects of the natural world, science, visual arts, dance, and politics, creating a rich tapestry of sounds and textures that resonate with listeners on multiple levels. By drawing inspiration from these diverse sources, I craft unique and captivating compositions that challenge and inspire. My creative process is fuelled by an insatiable curiosity for gestures, shapes, and sounds, and how they relate to the world and other art forms. I often engage with extra-musical sources, such as visual art, poetry, and scientific concepts, to stimulate my composition thoughts and structure my work. I find that these sources provide lenses through which I can conceptualize form, colour, and texture in my music, creating a multi-layered and immersive experience for the listener. Over the last few years I have become increasingly interested in collaboration and influence of different practitioners or artforms, whether this is with individual musicians – such as through the development of my concertos, such as Through the Fading Hour or my piano concerto Tautening skies - or more recently working with texts; existing poems, my own poems, and my collaborations with librettist Kendra Preston Leonard. My first collaboration with Kendra was on a work called a tulip iron, which was developed at the Creative Dialogues festival in France (2023). I wanted to write a work that grappled with difficult memories and could become something that sat between a song-cycle and an opera scene. I began trying to write my own poetry but was finding myself hitting a brick wall. My own poetry is usually very short, crystalline and perhaps because of the nature of the topic I was lost for words, which is why I speak so often with my music. When I approached Kendra for a unique text to set, I asked her to explore memory as something difficult, questioning why certain things happened the way they happened, questioning yourself and whether things were your own fault. I wanted the text to draw on the deep intense emotions that still bubble under the surface from the bullying and gaslighting I experienced at school. Kendra writes about the work: a tulip, iron is about the fear and horror created by psychological and emotional abuse, the relief of escape from abuse, and the work required to contend with traumatic memories of it. Using Perle Fine’s work The Early Morning Garden (1957) as a focusing device for this lyric, I work with elements of the natural world as well as my own personal history. The mezzo soprano and tenor serve as protagonist and antagonist, respectfully, and I’ve made it deliberately unclear as to whether their texts and interactions are taking place in the present or are memories. The text is in three loose sections, through which the protagonist moves from fear and intense self-doubt into greater agency, grapples with the causes and extent of her wounds, recognizes how trauma has shaped her, and becomes able to distance herself from it. The antagonist diminishes and humiliates the protagonist, causing her to hesitate and sing in fragments of sentences. He calls her simple and an embarrassment, disparaging her mind and body and abilities, even as she begins to communicate more fully and lyrically and draws on a wider world for her outlook. Finally, he—or the memory of his words and actions—falls silent, becoming nothing to the protagonist, as she leaves the scene—or memory—with self- determination. I have found this text deeply emotionally powerful to set. Alongside this, I engaged with the visual stimulus of Perle Fine's work ‘The Early Morning Garden’ as this had inspired Kendra’s text and served as a visual stimulus for the emotional canvas of the work. Taken together, these helped me find a soundworld that is a mixture of fragility and strength, whilst exploring the nuances of colours and distinct gestural shapes for both the string players and the vocalists. The piece should be treated as an imagined scene from a larger narrative trajectory, set ambiguously in memory or somewhere real; perhaps it is both. Performance of work at Creative Dialogues: In 2024 I was selected for the Aspen Music festival. As part of this there was an option to develop an opera scene that engaged with political themes. I have been increasingly interested in writing for opera and have been trying to find opportunities to prove I can write opera, having had my first taste of this at Creative Dialogues the previous year. I have always wanted to write an opera with a strong feminist story, and so I approached Kendra with a few ideas and then she came back with the suggestion of writing a scene based on the story of The Jane Collective. The Jane Collective were an underground Abortion Counselling Service that supported women before the monumental Roe vs. Wade Supreme Court decision. Between 1969 and 1973, Jane performed more than 11,000 abortions, without losing a single patient. When faced with the anti-abortion laws of the United States and the enormous inequalities in abortion access, they worked together across racial, class and religious divides to help pregnant people obtain safe abortions. This important story represents a universal struggle of women against the constraints put on them by society, showing how together they can help each other overcome seemingly impossible situations, and fight for a fairer world. It is a story I am honoured to tell through music and setting Kendra’s powerful text. Our latest collaboration is on our new work My Skin: A Selkie’s Tale written especially for the Illuminate Women’s Music tour 2024-25 in Scotland. This commission asked the composers to engage with themes of Scottish folklore, landscape and ancient people. As I researched, I came across a story unfamiliar to me about these unusual creatures called Selkies. There was one story that seemed to keep coming up in various guises called ‘The Fisherman’, about a Selkie having their skin stolen and being captured by a fisherman. All these retellings were written from a narrator’s perspective. Many stories across history rarely tell a story from a female protagonist’s point of view, and so I thought it would be great to hear from the female selkie; how does the story feel when it told directly by her? I approached Kendra with this idea in mind and was delighted to find out she knew the story very well already and this idea of exploring this narrative from the perspective of the female Selkie really resonated with her. Words on My Skin: A Selkie’s Tale – Kendra Preston Leonard I don’t remember how old I was, or where I lived, when I first read or heard about selkies, but it had to have been early in my obsession with Celtic myths and legends, which began when I was perhaps 6 or 7 and has never really ended. Then, the selkie represented a wondrous way of escaping the difficult and noisy and often overwhelming human world; if only I could change shape and disappear into the water, hearing only my own heartbeat and breath, I would be able to feel calm and safe. The more folklore and stories I read, though, the more it became clear that the story of the selkie is almost always a tragic one. While there are stories about love between humans and selkies (the 2014 film Song of the Sea is one example), many selkie stories focus on what happens when a man steals a selkie’s sealskin in order to trap her in her human form in bondage to him. In those stories, the selkie is desperate to find her skin and return to the sea above all else, often including the well-being of her children. These selkies were often isolated by their abductors as well as by geography. When Angela proposed using the story of the selkie for our piece for Illuminate Scotland, part of the Illuminate Women’s Music project, I was excited to give the selkie’s story a different ending, one that speaks to the power of women working together to help other women escape abusive relationships without diminishing the horror of those relationships, one that speaks to being persistent in seeking freedom, and to being empowered by being one’s true self. The narrator of My Skin is trapped and raped, and her children are mutilated by a man who kills her sister when she comes to rescue her. But the narrator’s clever, attentive, and sneaky daughters find their mother’s skin, and from her sister the narrator crafts them their own seal-coats so that she can take them with her into the sea when she flees. When this work is done, three tough and dedicated friends aid the selkie and her children in their escape and cry with joy to see them restored to the water. Angela’s setting of the text captures the selkie’s despair and anger and fear as well as her guile and cunning in finding a way to escape and take her children with her. We can hear her love of the ocean and her desire to be reunited with it, and her three friends—the lookout, the driver, and the one with a gun (based on a friend of mine)—get their own characterizations. One day we hope to write an opera that expands this song, an opera about the friendship and bravery of the women and girls introduced here, and about women being there for one another.
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This blog post introduces readers to the work of Hildegard of Bingen, as well as to the work of multiple present-day Hildegard of Bingen Scholars, including Jennifer Bain, Honey Meconi, Barbara Newman, and Alice Clark. Suggestions for further reading are given at the end of this post. INTRODUCTION Neither medieval composers nor women composers are particularly widely known outside of specialist circles. But if people know only one medieval composer, it is likely to be a woman, and if they know only one woman composer, she is likely to be medieval. I am talking, of course, about Hildegard of Bingen, a polymath German nun whose compositions have enjoyed an enduring revival since the 1980s, almost 900 years after her birth. BIOGRAPHY Hildegard was born in 1098 in Sponheim, Germany, to a family of the lower nobility. She was the youngest of 10 children, and was sickly, experiencing visions from an early age. Today we might interpret these visions as migraine auras, or perhaps a form of epilepsy, but she perceived them as spiritual visions (Foxhall 2014). Regardless of whether their origin was biological or divine, their effect on her was undeniably spiritual. Hildegard entered the Benedictine monastery at Disibodenberg as a child, sometime between the ages of 8 and 14, alongside her friend and mentor Jutta von Sponheim. There she learned to read and write, play the 10-string psaltery, and perhaps to notate music, skills not often accessible to women (or indeed to many men) in 12th century Germany. When Jutta died in 1136, Hildegard was elected abbess of the community. She later founded monasteries in Rupertsberg (1150) and Eibingin (1165), which she led until her death in 1179 (Embach 2021). WORK Hildegard was prolific in many areas, writing extensive volumes in fields as diverse as theology, philosophy, natural history, and medicine, as well as music. She wrote both words and music for at least 77 monophonic chants: this is more extant, definitively attributed works than for any other composer of that era. Hildegard’s chants are distinctive in style, employing a larger vocal range, freer use of melisma (multiple notes sung on a single syllable), and greater length than most contemporaneous works (Hughes 1989; Bain 2021). They are also notable for their rich intertextuality—their extensive use of borrowing from and references to works including biblical texts, chant texts and music by herself and others, and hagiographies (Bain 2021). Hildegard’s hour-long musical morality play Ordo Virtutum, composed shortly after she moved to Rupertsberg, is even more unusual in form and scope. It’s the earliest surviving morality play—a popular form of medieval drama in which a human protagonist must choose between personified good and evil attributes—and the only one with both words and music attributed (Burkholder et al. 2006). Telling of the struggle of a soul (Anima), torn between the Virtues and the Devil, Ordo Virtutum calls for an extensive array of singers, including Anima (solo female voice), the Virtues (17 solo female voices), a Chorus of Prophets and Patriarchs (a male chorus), a Chorus of Souls (a female chorus), and the Devil (a male voice that grunts and yells but does not sing). Because of its large size—and perhaps because morality plays are no longer a theatrical staple--Ordo Virtutum it is rarely performed today. For many centuries, Hildegard’s chants, too, had fallen out of widespread usage. In the 1980s, however, Hildegard’s work rose again to prominence, when the early music ensemble Gothic Voices’ recording A Feather on the Breath of God unexpectedly topped the charts (Bain 2004, 2017). Since then, hundreds of recordings have featured one or more Hildegard’s chants. Many performers strive for a historically informed interpretations, aiming to recreate the performance style(s) of Hildegard’s time. Others incorporate them into in New Age, jazz, electronica, instrumental, and/or film music. It’s important to note that even the most “authentic” performances of Hildegard’s music are only speculative, however. Hildegard notated words and pitches, but not rhythm, tempo, timbre, or dynamics, and of course we there are no aural records from the 12th century to guide contemporary interpretations (Boyce-Tillman 1999; Bain 2017). If there now seems to be an agreed-upon performance practice for Hildegard’s work, it is because contemporary musicians influence each other, and not because we know definitively how her music sounded in the twelfth century. REVIVAL Hildegard was of course an incredible musician, and her works are well deserving of their current popularity. Yet music played an enormous role in the lives of all nuns: all sang, typically at least eight times a day (more often than they spoke), and many would have composed as well (Beach 2021). Monks were equally active musically, as were many people outside of the church. Why do we know Hildegard’s music (and writing) so much better than that of her contemporaries? There are always multiple factors behind the revival of a composer: the quality of the music is important, of course, but it’s never the only factor (Bain 2004, 2017). At the very least, the music must have physically survived, and the revivalists must have the resources and social influence to bring the composer and their music to wider awareness. As a nun, Hildegard already had access to advantages unavailable to much of the wider population: education which allowed her to read, write and notate; writing materials and parchment; buildings which protected her manuscripts over centuries; a ready community of experienced performers willing to sing her work; the institutional power of the church. But the fact that we know Hildegard as the composer of her music has as much to do with her eventual canonisation as a saint as it does with the music itself. Twelfth-century chant collections were typically anonymous, with the included chants attributed to a place rather than to the composers who wrote them. Portfolios for sainthood, however, contained evidence of the proposed saint’s holy output, which for Hildegard included her compositions (Clark 2021). Beyond the significance of Hildegard’s music and writing, Hildegard herself has been and continues to be of symbolic importance for many. In Eibingen, where the Benedictine community she started continues to flourish, Hildegard’s popularity never waned. In religious circles, her beliefs were considered mainstream enough to appeal to traditional Catholics, while her individualistic and mystical approach to Catholicism helped her appeal to radicals too. Many in the church were (and in some cases still are) disinclined to listen to women, but the (perceived) divine origin of her visions lent credence to her voice (Newman 1985). Her keen interest in natural history and herbal medicine ensured her work was of interest in secular contexts as well. Indeed, Germany still has a number of “Hildegard” apothecaries which dispense her herbal remedies and lifestyle prescriptions. More recently, Hildegard’s life story has appealed to feminists looking for predecessors with artistic, philosophical, literary, theological, scientific and/or political clout. Hildegard had all of those. Though Hildegard’s spirituality fell strictly within the boundaries of medieval Catholicism, her mysticism gives her writing broader appeal, not only in contemporary Christianity, but also in ecumenical, interfaith, and New Age contexts (Boyce-Tillman 1999; Bain 2004, 2017; Clark 2021). CONTEXT
By focusing on the multiple factors which have led to Hildegard’s current renown, my intention here is not to downplay her accomplishments, musical or otherwise. She was a brilliant, prolific, and inventive composer whose music is fully deserving of the attention it currently receives. Rather, my intention is to ask: if even such an accomplished and prolific composer as Hildegard has required so many extra-musical supports to be known today, whose music do we not know that we should? Whose music was washed away in a flood or burnt in a fire? Who was second-in-command at an abbey and could never convince the other nuns to sing her music? Who came from a country that was destroyed by war? Whose visions were so far outside church norms that they were denounced as heretical? Who came from a religious tradition that was never given the wealth and infrastructure to flourish? Who composed brilliantly but never learned to notate? Whose music sits moldering in an attic, and will it be “discovered” while it is still salvageable? We may never know the answer to these questions, but I find it intriguing to speculate that Hildegard was not so much a lone genius as a representative of the many brilliant and compelling musical voices throughout history, one of the few that we have the privilege of continuing to know and celebrate today. BIBLIOGRAPHY A Modern Reveal (n.d.). Hildegard von Bingen. Retrieved November 5, 2024, from https://www.amodernreveal.com/hildegard-von-bingen#von-bingen- Bain, Jennifer (2004). Hildegard on 34th Street: Chant in the Marketplace. Echo. Bain, Jennifer (2017) Hooked on Ecstasy: Performance ‘Practice’ and the Reception of the music of Hildegard of Bingen. In The Sounds and Sights of Performance in Early Music. Routledge, 253-274. Bain, Jennifer (2021). Music, Liturgy, and Intertextuality in Hildegard of Bingen’s Chant Repertory. In: Bain J, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Hildegard of Bingen, 209-234. Beach, Alison (2021). Living and Working in a Twelfth-Century Women’s Monastic Community. The Cambridge Companion to Hildegard of Bingen, 37-51. Boyce-Tillman, June Barbara (1999). Hildegard of Bingen—A Woman for Our Time?. Feminist Theology 8(22). https://doi.org/10.1177/096673509900002 Burkholder, J. Peter, Claude V. Palisca, and Donald Jay Grout (2006). Norton Anthology of Western Music. W.W. Norton. Campbell, Nathaniel M., Beverly R. Lomer, and Xenia Sandstrom-McGuire (2015). The Symphonia and Ordo Virtutum of Hildegard von Bingen. Retrieved November 5, 2024, from https://www.hildegard-society.org/p/music.html Clark, Alice V. (2021). Uncovering a Diverse Early Music. Journal of Music History Pedagogy, 11(1), 1-21. Embach, Michael (2021). The Life of Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179). The Cambridge Companion to Hildegard of Bingen, 11-36. Foxhall, Katherine (2014). Making Modern Migraine Medieval: Men of Science, Hildegard of Bingen and the Life of a Retrospective Diagnosis. Medical History. 58(3):354-374. doi:10.1017/mdh.2014.28 Hildegard of Bingen (12th century), recorded on Gothic Voices (1982). A Feather on the Breath of God. LP. Hyperion 66039. Hughes, Andrew (1989). Style and Symbol, Medieval Music: 800–1453. Ottawa: Institute of Mediaeval Music, 30. Meconi, Honey. Hildegard of Bingen. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2018. Newman, Barbara (1985). Hildegard of Bingen: Visions and Validation. Church History 54 (2):163-175.https://www.jstor.org/stable/3167233 |
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