bernard d. sherman. inside early music, conversations with performers

Chapter 3. Vox Feminae, Barbara Thornton on Hildegard of Bingen

Hildegard (1098-1179), the founder and abbess of a Benedictine nunnery in Bingen, Germany, first came to the attention of modern America in a book about headaches. Oliver Sacks's 1970 book Migraines included an essay ¹ arguing that Hildegard's mystical visions were “indisputably migrainous”, although with characteristic open-mindedness he has also written that this “does not detract in the least from their psychological or spiritual significance” ². What is significant for my discussion, though, is that in describing Hildegard's “exceptional intellectual and literary powers”—shown in her work as, among other things, a mystic, poet, naturalist, and playwright—Sacks made no mention of her music. This oversight was by no means unusual; even many music historians in 1970 knew little about Hildegard.

Today Hildegard is known chiefly for her music. What brought about the change was a pair of 1982 CDs, Gothic Voices' A Feather on the Breath of God, and Sequentia's Ordo Virtutum. Both still stand among the best-selling recordings yet made of early music. Several factors have been suggested for the discs' popularity, among them Hildegard's appeal to the rising interest in women's spirituality, the feminist search for great women composers, and—a factor we have already encountered—the quest for transcendence, by the same audience that has since made best-sellers of the monks of Silos and Anonymous 4. All these factors intertwine, no doubt, with an essential one: Hildegard's musical and poetic genius. No one can reasonably claim that her works need any special pleading based on her gender.

Hildegard's “everflowing, rapturous outpouring of melody” ³ seems unusual even to those who know little of her contemporaries' music; according to Barbara Thornton, who knows a great deal of such music, Hildegard's musical language surpasses that of her contemporaries in “intensity and breadth” ⁴. Thornton's own contributions to the Hildegard revival include scholarly articles and the reconstruction of the Ordo Virtutum (The Play of the Virtues), an allegorical music-drama, which she has not only recorded but has also published, staged, and had filmed; above all, they include her performances, which convey Hildegard's vision with special fervor. Thornton is now recording Hildegard's complete works, a process to be completed in time for Hildegard's 900th birthday in 1998.

Thornton, an American-born soprano, began working on medieval music with her partner, Benjamin Bagby, in 1974, when the two were graduate students at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis in Switzerland. In 1977 the pair founded Sequentia, which performs a wide range of medieval music, from Occitan troubadour songs to Old English sagas to early polyphonic motets. The group is based in Cologne, about 75 miles (as it happens) from Bingen. Our discussion of Hildegard reveals Sequentia's general approach to preparation: an uncompromising immersion in the music, language, texts, milieu, and cultural as well as musical sources. It includes using only the original medieval notation, and memorizing everything performed, for reasons that become clear when Thornton speaks about orality in medieval culture.

I interviewed Thornton when she was touring with Sequentia's ensemble of five women, Vox Feminae, in a program of music by Hildegard. Their concert the next day was in San Francisco's Grace Cathedral, a Gothic structure with a reverberation time of about six seconds. The architecture was appropriate—the Gothic style emerged during Hildegard's lifetime—and with its stained-glass light reflected Christendom's turn toward subjective, personal religious feeling, which finds such strong expression in Hildegard's music. The acoustics proved appropriate, too: while a twelve-part Renaissance Mass would have been lost in the echo, Hildegard's “ecstatic devotions” (as the program notes called them) seemed all the more celestial.

Hildegard's era, the twelfth century, was innovative and transitional—the era when Europe began to rediscover Aristotle, when modern scientific thought began to emerge, when Christian piety became more personal and emotional as opposed to sacramental, when the Virgin Mother really took a central place as a figure of devotion, when the idea of “courtly love” emerged, the seeds of humanism were sown, and so on ⁵.

In many areas of thought, certainly in those of literature and music, the eleventh and twelfth centuries demonstrated an enormous burst of energy which modern writers have often called a renaissance of sorts ⁶. However, I think it is now accepted that “renaissances” are actually very carefully prepared in previous times: for example, the great surge of so-called Marian worship, which came to pervade every aspect of twelfth-century art, had been gaining momentum since the ninth century.

Musically, the twelfth century seems to me in a way the apogee of the archaic mind. In it the mind has not yet become technological in our modern sense, but has reached an enormous imaginative flowering according to pre-existing rules. In this sense, twelfth-century music fits a certain modern approach to the idea of what an avant-garde is: in its search for innovation and new expression, it takes even the most archaic forms and uses them to make new music. Our era has become interested in so-called primitive ways of life and of thinking—African art, modal music of all varieties, shamanistic traditions, etc.—as it has, in a sense, exhausted the rationalistic way of doing things; our era has also discovered that there is an attractive radicalism in so-called archaic world views.

The musical/poetic spirit of the twelfth century entails both tradition and innovation. It is very forward-looking and avant-garde, because creators considered their own creations as utterly new; but the older rules of operation were never abandoned. There's an insistence in certain musical and poetic repertories on the idea: “This is nova cantica”, “this is new song”. Of course nova cantica is a term that comes from the Bible, in several different contexts, but it also reflects the sense in which we today say “this is new music”—this is the latest, this is the hottest, this is the newest, this is refreshing, this is going to wake up parts of your spirit that have been asleep. And yet there is no sense at all of “to do this we have to cut off from what came before”. It's rather very much in the spirit of this era to imagine a tree of Jesse, coming from deep roots and spreading infinitely from its fertile origins.




How did Hildegard, with her huge range of accomplishments, fit into this era?

There were not many people like Hildegard in her era. There were some other “universal geniuses”, however. One, for example, was the theologian and poet-composer Peter Abelard, who added a great deal of original work to the tradition and was an accepted though controversial master. Another was the poet-theologian Alan of Lille. Hildegard can easily take her place among those two. She's also been compared to the Arab philosopher-encyclopedist-healer Avicenna [980-1037] ⁷. She was well known in her period, though not as well known as Abelard or as widely read as Alan of Lille. But unlike Abelard, she took the necessary steps to ensure that she not fall into disfavor with the higher political powers of her day and that her position stay secure within the Church. Over time she also gained official recognition of her gifts as a prophetess and visionary. Without that official recognition, she probably would have had more clashes with authority than she did have. In fact, toward the end of her life the prelates of Mainz decreed a temporary ban on music in her cloister, in response to a perceived disobedience on her part ⁸. But in general, she knew which important steps to take to ensure her creative freedom. If she had come under the shadow of serious suspicion, the authorities would presumably have cut her off very quickly.

In Hildegard we also see someone who, within that secure position, saw to it that her works were documented. She seems to have had scribes of the highest caliber, copyists with great expertise in music notation, even very gifted illustrators; she was obviously in a position to call on the best people. In this she resembles composers of later centuries such as Guillaume de Machaut and Oswald von Wolkenstein, poet-musicians who also supervised the creation of manuscripts of their works.




Could you say something about her background?

At the age of eight, she entered a Benedictine double cloister—a monastic community consisting of men and women, where all labor and forms of worship were carried out equally but separately—called Disibodenberg, near to her birthplace. This cloister must have been very aristocratic, and intellectually of very high standards. For most of her early life, Hildegard was cloistered alone with an older woman, Jutta of Spondheim, who taught her in isolation for many years. Her education must have included a formidable body of religious knowledge. Apparently, this woman was also her teacher in areas such as healing—what we would call medicine—and in what we would call natural sciences. A recent article by the medieval scholar Peter Dronke ⁹ identifies some of the more obscure writings that Hildegard must have known when she was putting her own writings together. He concludes that she had one of the better educations available at the time, if we can speak in such terms. Perhaps the terms “privately tutored” and “self-educated” might be appropriate for describing how she came to command such a breadth of knowledge and originality of thought.

Dronke in this article refers to some very esoteric works known to Hildegard. She seems to have had access to some quite progressive and up-to-date material whose Latin was rich and full of images, as was fashionable then. More general influences came from her lifelong familiarity with the Bible and its commentaries, and the writings of the Church fathers. In addition, twelfth-century thinkers were drawing on much Platonic literature, and on many sources of music and drama from Antiquity. Perhaps the most pervasive influence of all came from religious rites at the convent, and all the types of contemporary music and poetry that would have been heard in a well-to-do, mainstream monastic institution of the time.




So this cloister presumably had a large library, and a source of new books?

Yes; but it seems, according to newer assessments of medieval intellectual life, such as those of Mary Carruthers and her school ¹⁰, that in this era books were crucial to the tradition but were not used in a manner we are accustomed to. A book, as a repository of thought and wisdom, was almost a symbol of the intellect's ability to store words in memory so that they could be used at will for reasoning, speaking, and composing. It has been crucial for us, dealing with all periods of the Middle Ages no matter how advanced, to be sure that we understand that basic premise. It was common that in one's education the available works of Plato and other philosophers, the Bible, commentaries, and other favored works, were interiorized through active memorization more than just being read off the page. An intellectual would have memorized—using certain systems for facilitating the process—vast amounts of knowledge in his lifetime. Therefore learning, certainly of music and literature, took place mostly on an oral basis.




How does this orality apply to Hildegard?

Hildegard wrote some very intriguing things about her own processes of musical creation. As you know, she claims to have heard her songs directly from the Spirit with her “inner ears”, although (she explains) she did not “know neumes”—meaning she did not know how to notate music. Some modern writers have taken this statement to be an expression of false modesty on her part, or a way of strengthening her claims to having “mystic” or direct connection to divine inspiration, which would seem to use her ignorance as a medium for reaching her senses. I have no way of knowing in exactly what spirit she makes the claim of “seeing” and “hearing” Divine Light. I do not think it beyond imagining that she would assume a humble personality as a literary device, or attempt to create a mythology out of her gifts and works in order to give them authenticity. She may, indeed, have created an acceptable persona for her peers, in order to remain in a position to continue her various enterprises. In any case, what is significant from the practicing musician's point of view is that her claim is, in fact, a plausible statement from any accomplished musician of the period. The realms of theorizing about or notating music were separate from that of actually producing sounding music. In both cases we're dealing with skills of a highly specialized nature reserved for very few people. In general, the class of the musically active was not musically literate (this situation changed over the next few centuries).

Once you take that premise of orality seriously, it changes very fundamentally all your opinions and feelings about the evidence that comes from the period. In particular, people had interiorized their knowledge to such an extent that adding a commentary or contribution of one's own to the body of knowledge was already an enormous step. For us today it's easy to say that an intellectual contribution should be above all “original”, but for twelfth-century thinkers originality would be expressed differently. Probably the majority of one's intellectual life consisted of exchanging and transmitting knowledge with other individuals who had the same sort of deeply stored textual information; exchanging ideas on this material was already one vital level of intellectual creativity in the period. To take the next step, then, and document in written form one's original opinion or commentary upon the basic body of knowledge would imply that a very creative contribution was being made. While to us it may seem that commentators of this type were adding minimal amounts of information and new thought, it is actually because we approach “knowledge” with a fundamentally different philosophy from intellectuals of that period. We tend to “project” knowledge into books; they stored it, had it readily available, used it to build their souls. When we see representations of monks laboriously copying books and adding their commentaries, we are actually in the presence of those people who were recognized as masters in their tradition.

In musical situations as well, the risk, the audacious step, of adding melodies to the existing canon was one taken only by a master.




Regarding Hildegard, what was the body of existing music that she was working from?

Her compositions are strictly religious, and seem to be very much based on the ideas and traditions of Gregorian chant; they take the elemental ideas, such as modes, formulas, and subject matter, and widen the scale of the whole experience both technically and emotionally.




So Gregorian chant is the tree of Jesse you spoke about at the outset?

That would be a way of putting it, yes. To people who are involved in the notation and realization of Gregorian chant, tenth- through twelfth-century new music must seem very simple, actually. The complexities in notation and in theology and literary exegesis are heavily concentrated in Gregorian chant; twelfth-century pieces add a certain transparency, certain “performance qualities” if you will. Such pieces are usually intended to embroider central events in religious services, be it a Mass or an Office. This embroidery creates new forms and attitudes, and gives an outlet for contemporary feeling and thinking. On the level of real composition and experience, our pieces are elementary compared to Gregorian chant—they were intended to be that way. Anyone who's interested in the molten core of this whole process needs to look at Gregorian chant, its notation, its history, its performance, its repertoire. Then the newness of our music becomes apparent.

From modern writers we might get the impression that there is something simple and cute about medieval melody; this is a fundamental misunderstanding. There is enormous power implied in these kinds of modal melodies, but only with a great deal of study can a modern person add the imagination necessary to understand what is implied and to realize the intended effects. Although we do have direct evidence about instrumental music—we know there was an art and tradition of arranging notes without texts—the heart of medieval tradition is liturgical, which is preserved as an untouchable and unalterable repertory of chant. As a composer, you didn't try to change that repertory; you spent your life trying to realize it. Then, if you wanted to entertain yourself and your friends and have literary/musical experiences of a new sort, you might, based on this intense relationship to certain themes, add individual arrangements and pitches and so on, but drawing from an enormous reservoir of communally interiorized associations. Modal music lives from these kinds of associations, just as language does.




So you're talking about associations with specific Gregorian formulas and melodies from a standard repertoire?

Yes. All modal musics seem to enjoy this fluidity, this protean quality which allows a gesture to take on one meaning within one context and a different one in the next context. People are writing very interesting things in ethnomusicological circles ¹¹ about how modal or proto-modal music systems work which shed light on these processes. In our experiences in Sequentia, we have found that a modal gesture does not unfold uniquely on the “horizontal” level as a melody might. A modal system is much more a matter of defining some very simple constructive principles, attaching meaning to those simple elements, and then learning to combine them significantly ¹².

Now, the modal system is always significant, but it's relatively undogmatic despite its elemental laws. It is also open to exceptions (here too it is a lot like language and grammar). But one must build up associations to the elements and combinations in order to understand the next level of significance.

Now, I don't suppose there is an essential difference in this respect between modal and tonal music. I suppose they could be considered ancient and modern versions of the same language, the only difference being that the average listener has built up these associations only for tonalities and not for modalities. As a result of our lack of associations, though, when we hear a modal figuration we make an inner judgment as if it were a melody. Because we're so busy with the melody on the horizontal level, we can't appreciate the very specific messages of modes. Each gesture shows a new understanding of how to combine elements and colors. If we don't relate to the fundamental colors, we won't hear the individual shadings.




What do you mean by color? You don't mean timbre, obviously.

I don't, you're right. The “color” is the emotional effect of the relative placement of pitches in a modal gesture. It means, for example, that intervals, especially imperfect ones ¹³, are never “absolute” but always derive their significance from their modal context. On the other hand, the actual pitches of the gamut (the known spectrum of pitches) do have some “absolute” associations. The composer plays with both levels when he sets up an arrangement of modal gestures.

Not surprisingly, I think one's real associations to modes develop through practice, not through descriptions such as I've tried to give. Medieval modal music, like other modal musical cultures, is a very practice-oriented tradition. You can't learn to associate from music theory books, or from schemes that show modes in a scale, because a mode doesn't exist in a scale. Presenting a mode in a scale is the worst thing you can do to it. It would be like writing a treatise on painting by saying, Here is the row of pigments—red, orange, yellow, green, blue—now you understand how to combine them. It doesn't tell you anything about, for example, how modal colors relate to emotions.

This is part of why text is so important to our music, for the emotional world of the text constitutes the fundamental color of a musical composition. We have also found some old treatises, such as ninth- through eleventh-century handbooks for cantors, to be helpful in revealing contemporary ways of looking at “Gregorian” modes ¹⁴. The authors of such books developed a tradition of terms and affects associated with the several modes ¹⁵. For example, what we call Dorian mode—the D-oriented or “protus” mode—for them had the quality of gravitas (it was grave in the sense of solemn) and also had the association of nobilitas, nobility. It was called fons et origo, the source and origin of all other modes. If you superimpose these ideas upon a string of pitches in this mode, you also get a concrete result. Superimposing upon the music the emotional idea of a text then represents another level which must be interiorized in a given piece.




You mentioned text as a color. It's sometimes asserted that in medieval music the text was primary, and the music decorated it; and sometimes the opposite is claimed ¹⁶. How do you apply this question to Hildegard?

I think that in making music of any sort, but especially in singing religious music, the process which results when text and music combine cannot be analyzed in this way at all. I can't see that one element in this process could possibly dominate the other. Leo Treitler, whose writings have influenced our work, uses the term “text carrier” or “text vehicle” for medieval music. That usage has been interpreted as relegating music to a subservient role; but I think that perhaps demonstrates a certain lack of understanding of how medieval people thought of “word”. Word (logos) is practically the Tao of Western civilization.




That fits in with what you've been saying about its being an oral tradition: Walter Ong writes that oral cultures commonly, and probably universally, consider words to have enormous power ¹⁷, though that implies the primacy of the word—as in “in principio erat verbum”, in the beginning was the Word.

But ascribing great power to words doesn't necessarily grant them primacy. It is hard to convince modern people of one basic truth: that the medieval poems are music in and of themselves. This idea is fundamental to the classic definition of poetry—“words set to music” (with or without pitches). It depends on how intensely you relate to the poetry to know just how the music of a text operates. So to say, as some people do, that the word comes first and the music comes second is an absurdity, because to the medieval person the concept of music is an all-encompassing idea; it's the most divine thing a human being has at his or her disposal. It's even more divine than Word, because it reaches above human words to superhuman WORD, and it's thoroughly inexplicable in its origins and effects (although it obeys certain laws). In the mind of a medieval person, it comes as close as anything can to giving an image of what cosmos and soul are like. Augustine's treatise De Musica deals with music, as such, in terms of texts because, he says, one experiences the proportions of all types of harmony more clearly through texts. This was the accepted way of looking at music in the Middle Ages. So to combine the music of word and the sounding music of pitch represents an extreme potency in and of itself; we ought not try to pull it apart and say which should come first, word or music, because it puts us in the wrong frame of mind.

Moreover, a medieval cleric heard and sang vast amounts of music in the Latin language in his lifetime. Clerical musicians experienced music and text in the highly integrated form of Gregorian chant, and it formed the psychic background of their own music-making. So the question of which comes first would be meaningless to them. They'd have lived with the power of chant all their lives.




Regarding Hildegard's own use of the word, Peter Dronke writes, in the liner notes to your Symphoniae CD, that her “poetic effects are often strange and violent,” not smooth like those of most of her contemporaries, and that her anaphoras, superlatives, exclamations, “daring mixed metaphors”, and intricate grammatical constructions make her Latin stand out in her era ¹⁸.

All I could add from the performer's point of view is just how effective these metaphors and images (and even the strange things she attempts) really are. In his article about her influences, Dronke traces the origins of some of these obscure images. He quotes a passage where Aristotle says that the merit of a poet lies in his metaphors. A more pragmatic statement might be that the merit of a poet is tested by how much life is in the images he or she creates. One criterion of poetic merit from the memorization treatises of Antiquity and the Middle Ages is the vividness of a given allegory or image, making it suitable for memory. Their theory of memorization had to do with making one's soul receptive to the energy of imaginative material. A creative person was an image maker, and the effectiveness of a creation could be judged by the relative ease or difficulty with which one could interiorize the images. If they were easily interiorized and seemed to live within one, both immediately and over the long term, then perhaps one could say that the poet was very good. Without question, Hildegard is such a poet-creator-musician. You never tire of her images. They're very specific, very intricate, very alive!




Could you give an example?

One might be her imagery for Wisdom from her antiphon O virtus sapentiae: “You power of Wisdom / that circled circling / and embracing all / in a course that is filled with life— / You have three wings: / one soars into the heights, / another has moisture from the earth, / the third flies all around” ¹⁹.

As that example may show, the ways her images are chained together always has an extremely organic logic that the body and the mind are more than willing to follow, and there's something so musical and pleasing about the process of interiorizing these images. Of course, the music facilitates that. It bring these image-experiences into the self in a very specific—modally specific—way. Everything is crafted to the utmost, so that one is very quickly in a position to live what's being composed. I think that's a good criterion for judging a poet-composer.




You said that in music she derives her procedure from the tradition of Gregorian chant, but expanded it. Could you give an example?

Remember, Hildegard was by no means unique in having based her flights of imagination upon the stable repertoires of her experience. It is the power and scope and degree of surety in her flights that contributed to her individual, recognizable musical style, and this is extremely rare in the Middle Ages. As an example, one might look at the (presumably) tenth-century antiphon Alma Redemptoris Mater and a composition of Hildegard's called Ave Maria, O auctrix vite. Her piece could be called a composed improvisation upon all the elements found in the older liturgical piece—its mode, its message, its individual gestures, its overall curve and construction. One can truly appreciate the inexhaustible source of invention which was Hildegard's when one sees how skillfully she has embroidered upon the original material ²⁰.




Regarding the element of musical craft, in describing how you developed the Ordo Virtutum, one thing you mentioned was that to Hildegard different instruments represented different things—the strings earthly striving, the harp heavenly blessedness, the flutes the presence of God. You used this information in scoring the piece.

That was based on her other theological works, which were very helpful to our preparation because she expresses herself so vividly—and repetitively, so that certain ideas gain stable associations in the mind. And her feeling for music is prevalent no matter what she's writing about.

We still take the poetic license offered to us by her poetic vision of seeing everything, including instruments, in terms of the divine scheme. She gives very specific information about how she thought various aspects of music affect the soul. This is completely in keeping with other things you can read from the period, that all disciplines—rhetoric and grammar, arithmetic and so on—are intended for the enrichment of the soul. Therefore, instruments, by their very natures, communicate diverse modes, emotions, and symbolic associations, in addition to being embodiments of musica instrumentalis.

We don't use instruments nearly as much now as we did when we recorded the Ordo, which was over ten years ago. Instruments were very helpful for singers not initiated into modal thinking, and we're a little more secure in our feeling for modes. Instruments—or should I say instrumentalists—realize these things so quickly and clearly. Instruments stimulate imagination: they are very potent, and they should be used as judiciously as possible, so that the word and the modal gesture, whether realized by voice or instrument, remain the main sources and means of impregnating the imagination.




That brings to mind Hildegard's mysticism; does it influence your approach to her music?

One must probably take seriously her accounts of how she had visions and heard music; she says that her compositions are not, strictly speaking, her works, but that she functioned as a medium for them. I do take that seriously, even if I don't always understand what it might actually imply. Today the creative personality is made the object of a cult and is exalted as such; in her era that concept of the solitary creative genius hadn't developed to such an extent. Her claims of being a medium are not really that different from what many people today are saying about the creative process generally, but hers are ultimately bigger claims.

Sometimes one is tempted to feel she is justified in claiming “mystic” inspiration—her music is so perfect in certain ways. She's a first-rate composer by any criterion of composing. This is not an instance of having to bend around the issues because she's a woman or because we are dealing with music from the remote twelfth century—hers is first-rate music by any definition or method. Many things in her upbringing explain the coherence of her concepts, but if mystical inspiration is how she explains or defines her personal genius, then by taking it seriously we are also taking the religious content of her poetry seriously when it isn't second nature for us to do that at all. I don't know anyone today whose own history prepares them for the kind of detail and intensity of her religious experience. In that respect, her claim has helped us put ourselves in a position to receive this music as we might not have done otherwise—as we do have a rather secular way of looking at creation and inspiration nowadays. She made sure with her explanations of her creative process that we not secularize her works.




Dronke writes in those notes about her world view, which was definitely not secularized.

In all eras, there are probably prevalent, archetypal views of the world that people generally share with varying degrees of consciousness, and then there are learned world views which might be built up on a system of central and secondary texts or belief systems. The learned world view in the Middle Ages might take various forms but seems to have had as its basis a synthesis of sacred disciplines and systematically rational ones (which they called “scientia”). One author who influenced this synthesis greatly was Plato—and he came into the medieval spheres of knowledge through various channels. For example, a Platonic-Boethian theory of music is based on a vision of the cosmos in which three “musics” are recognized: a music of the spheres, or harmony in the heavens (musica mundana); an unexpressed harmony above that, the harmony of God; and below it the harmony of the soul (musica humana). Sounding music (which medievals called musica instrumentalis) brings these together in a manifestation, so that the soul which “hears” it becomes “symphonic”, expressing itself in the inner accord of the soul and the body; thus music-making is both earthly and heavenly.

In our day, this cosmic scheme seems like an archaic myth. Some call it the myth of Timaeus, from Plato's dialogue of that title ²¹. But that's where the term “myth” falls short. In the twelfth century, people didn't think of this scheme of things as myth; they thought of it as reality, just as we consider it reality that we turn a light switch and have the lights go on, or that the earth goes around the sun. For them, the harmony of the celestial spheres and its mirror on earth in the soul was just as real as what we call scientific fact.

Some people say that medieval people had a degree of faith in their religious beliefs that went beyond most modern believers' experiences.

Well, textbooks call the Middle Ages the Age of Faith, but even that term doesn't explain the phenomenon well. Even the word “faith” has something Protestant about it. We are all post-Reformation people, and also post-Inquisition people. The Church as an organization discredited itself over the centuries. It hadn't yet reached that turning point in the twelfth century, so there was little necessity to isolate “faith” from any other phenomena in the intact world view of that period.

We live in an era where things have become much more relative. We embrace thousands of different realities in a given day. Consider all the styles, periods, and types of music we listen to in a given day, all the different traditions, epochs, and experiences we confront through TV or film or books. In a sense, there are elements to living within an intact world view that we will never understand.




How does her world view influence your work on Hildegard?

For me, she was a very important gateway to all medieval thought. Her intensity and immediacy, and that quality to her work that one could identify as feminine, made it a lot easier for me to come into a profound medieval experience. Working on Hildegard's music is demanding, and that is part of the intensity of the experience, part of the reason one says, in retrospect, “I think I really lived through something doing this”. Yet we don't necessarily have time to think about these things when we're performing it. It is extremely hard work to sing her music: not in the sense that it is drudgery, but because we must know where to put our concentration at all times. Her music provides a strong incentive to learn the craft of medieval song. And that's also a reason why she was a pivotal experience for me, because she helped me identify my craft and make such a full identification with it that a lot of other issues fell away afterwards.




You spoke about the feminine elements of Hildegard; her spending her life in an abbey was presumably a basic part of this? I think of texts where she exalts virgins, an important theme in her work.

You know, I spent a lot of my early life among women, in school and at home, and I think I do have an inkling now of how female religious communities might function. I've been doing professional work with women for quite a while, and I really enjoy it. I can easily identify with what Hildegard is aiming for in writing music to be sung by women. There is something normal and everyday about valuing women—if you spend your time with women, you come to understand their special natures. I suppose it's the same for any man who spends his life married to a woman; at a certain point womanly things become treasured and yet “everyday”. Hildegard von Bingen has been able to express certain of these treasured feminine things through the themes she chooses: Mary, praise of the virgins, stories and meditations based on the Saint Ursula legend, Wisdom literature, and so forth. From Hildegard, I've learned a lot about women's musicality, women's relationship to their own spirituality. It sounds trite, but it is worthwhile to seek out “feminine Divinity” in addition to the all-pervasive Father principle; feminine spirituality is something very natural, uncomplicated, and yet intense, in my experience.




Is it just her themes, such as the ones you mentioned, or is it something beyond that?

Certain poetic “paintings” of the idea of womankind, even in the way she composes around it, are very lovely and revealing of her profound feelings about womanhood. Look at pieces like Quia ergo femina or O tu suavissima virga. She uses standard medieval images like comparing women to flowers, but the distinction of her style is in the exalted way she does it. She makes it easy to feel high and sensuous things, and, based on these good feelings, she will try to insert grander ideas about archetypal womanhood as well (drawing on established Judeo-Christian tradition), so that suddenly imagining something like a beautiful Mother principle governing the world becomes conceivable to the singer, where it was not conceivable before. Such ideas had previously been presented in contexts I absolutely could not accept.




This is often spoken of as an era when, as in most of history, women were subjugated; and people like Norman Cantor have applied that idea to Hildegard ²². But some argue that this was also the era in which the seeds of the eventual recognition and emancipation of women first emerge—the adventure-romances like the Arthurian cycles that were written in that century put women and feminine qualities in a more positive light than before ²³.

I would certainly want to distance myself from Cantor's statement about Hildegard's creative motivations being frustrated and rebellious. There's something glorious about the twelfth century that you can feel in many male writers as well as female writers (of which there are surprisingly many ²⁴): an admiration for women's spontaneous musicality and spirituality. Many spiritual men were able to recognize, pay homage to, and aspire to that quality without feeling any conflict. Their homage is couched in specific terms. For example, in our program tomorrow, one section is formulated with the feeling and vocabulary of the biblical Song of Songs, which has been a pivotal text for musical composition in all eras (after all it's the song of songs). The work can be seen as a dramatization of what is yin and yang in the universe, of how beautifully they move together in nature and in reality, and how desperately it hurts the soul when they're forced apart. These were conscious issues in the twelfth century, and the fact that this text served as such an important basis for theological discourse as well as for lyric art says a lot about the imaginal quality of the period.

SELECTED DISCOGRAPHY

Andrew Porter, in a review of a Sequentia concert, asserted that “singing more beautiful than theirs is not to be heard today” and followed this with a catalogue of virtues that is worth quoting at length: “pure, steady tone from open throats; supple movement through the phrases; pure intonation, with precise intervals; verbal force and clarity, with vowels distinctly colored; rhythmic liveliness serving at once the sense of the word and the musical structures.” He concluded, “[T]his was a demonstration that bel canto—beautiful, eloquent singing that by its sound can move listeners to rapture—is an art not lost” ²⁵. One might compare Porter's list with one that Christopher Page gives, near the end of the next chapter, of his own desiderata for medieval singing; both the overlaps and the differences are instructive. Sequentia attempts to express the text more in its singing style; that, plus the fact that it uses instruments more (although, as Thornton says, they use them less now than they once did), has sometimes caused controversy in the British musical press ²⁶.

Of the group's many recordings for Deutsche Harmonia Mundi, the most relevant to this chapter are, of course, those of Hildegard. Their 1994 Canticles of Ecstasy (DHM 77320) gives a good idea of what I heard at Grace Cathedral. It is described as the first in the projected complete Hildegard series, which suggests, Jerome F. Weber writes, that “the ensemble recognizes how far it has come since their” early 1980s Hildegard recordings—though some regarded their Symphoniae (DHM 77020-2–RG, rec. 1982-83) as having surpassed other available Hildegard recordings at the time of its release. Weber praises the “ecstatic interpretations” in Canticles and in the second CD of the series, Voice of the Blood (DHM 77346-2) ²⁷.” In her Gramophone review of Canticles (May 1995, p. 94), Mary Berry praises the singers' ability to “give a real shape and meaning” to Hildegard's soaring phrases, and adds, “Their vocal quality is very much what I would like to think Hildegard herself would have expected from her own company of nuns—firm, unwavering, exultant”.

Sequentia's many other CDs display their wide range of sympathies. A sense of this range can be gained from Vox lberica, their three-CD set (DHM 77333) of Hispanic repertoire, since it covers many medieval styles: polyphony, improvised polyphony, monophony, popular music, troubadour songs, and so forth. The discs are available singly as Sons of Thunder (DHM 77199) for men's ensemble, Codex Las Huelgas (77238) for women's ensemble, and El Sabio (77173) for mixed ensembles. El Sabio is probably the disc to start with if you buy them separately; Ivan Moody especially praises the “marvellous 'Bulgarian' folk sound (and, indeed, harmony) of the women's choir in the incantatory Sobelos fondos do mar” ²⁸.



FOR FURTHER READING

A good biography of Hildegard is Sabina Flanagan's Hildegard of Bingen: A Visionary Life (London: Routledge, 1989). Hildegard's own words are available in Barbara Newman's Symphoniae (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988) and Joseph Baird and Radd K. Ehrman's translations of The Letters of Hildegard of Bingen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994). Newman's Sisters of Wisdom: Hildegard's Theology of the Feminine (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987) provides a different approach. Norman Cantor's Medieval Lives (New York: Harper, 1994) contains an enjoyable short story featuring Hildegard, though many people, including Thornton, might take issue with it.

Peter Dronke's work on medieval poetry includes some important discussions of Hildegard. See especially chap. 6 of his Women Writers of the Middle Ages (Cambridge University Press, 1984), and also his Poetic Individuality in the Middle Ages (Oxford University Press, 1970).

Regarding the effects of oral tradition on plainchant—its structure, creation, and transmission—the pioneering work in English is that of Leo Treitler. As I write, this has not yet appeared in book form but is spread over many journal articles; the best summary is “'Unwritten' and 'Written' Transmission of Medieval Chant and the Start-up of Musical Notation”, the Journal of Musicology 10 (1992), pp. 131-91. Peter Jeffery's Re-Envisioning Past Musical Cultures: Ethnomusicology in the Study of Gregorian Chant (University of Chicago Press, 1993) is an important book, especially for its voluminous bibliography. Two critical reviews of the book have been Treitler's “Sinners and Singers: A Morality Tale”, Journal of the American Musicological Society 47 (Fall 1994), pp. 137-71, in essence a defense of his work against Jeffery's, and Edward Nowacki's review in Notes 8 (March 1994), pp. 913-17.