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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