Hildegard von Bingen is a musical sensation. Well, in relative terms at least. Twenty years ago she was unheralded even in the most knowledgable of musical circles. Today she is feted by everyone from adoring academics to the dancers of Ibiza, who this summer grooved to the beat of her work remixed. A new album of her chants, 11,000 Virgins, is proving one of the most popular classical releases this Christmas. Not bad for somebody who will be 900 next year.
To remove her music from its context as devotional music is to misunderstand it - it is fundamentally music for worship. But she has the uncanny knack of being all things to all people. Her particular style of plainsong is providing a treasure trove for scholars of early music, while recent releases of her music have been snapped up in large numbers by the same stressed-out set who have turned to Gregorian chant for something relaxing. Even more bizarre is the fact that two of her songs have been remixed on the Divine Works album for lovers of Sacred-Spirit-type ambient music who seek something that little bit different.
???art, with people looking for something spiritual during the Christmas season. But That she should be so ubiquitous is somehow fitting, for Hildegard mastered an extraordinarily wide variety of trades. She wrote two scientific works that covered areas of reproduction and the curative powers of natural objects. She founded two convents. She composed a large amount of religious music, setting her own Latin verse to melodies. And she achieved such renown for her mystical writings, which she always attributed to divine revelation, that she became known as the Sibyl (a woman who becomes a mouthpiece for God) of the Rhine.
She lived a full life of which, unusually, we know much because of the facts gathered after her death with a view to her canonisation. She never was canonised, but she has been beatified. Born a tenth child, after experiencing visions in 1098 at the age of eight she was given to the church into the care of a frankly alarming nun called Jutta, who lived in a tiny cell, cut off from the world. So distant from the world was Jutta, in fact, that she received the Last Rites before entering her cell. Here Hildegard received a rudimentary education but, more importantly, was steeped in the music of the adjoining abbey. After the death of Jutta, Hildegard founded a convent at Bingen, near Cologne, where she spent the rest of her life working on her music and more especially her writings. These were gathered into a volume called Scivias (Know The Ways) which told of 26 visions.
However, for all her extraordinary achievements and visions (which some have recently attributed to migraine), it is always proper to remember that Hildegard was at heart highly conventional in her religious outlook. In a time when divine visions are scoffed at, it may seem strange to call her "conventional", but when one considers some of the outrageous chancers who have made trades of relics and preached strange doctrines, Hildegard was a model of propriety.
For all her views of an egg-shaped cosmos and her bizarre visions, she constantly sought papal approval for her work and preached a remarkably balanced and sensible doctrine. In later years several clerical composers would masquerade behind a virtually nominal priesthood, but Hildegard was devotional at all times. She constantly preached against schismatics, and was steadfastly attached to the church. It is for her music that she is primarily studied today, however. She lived almost exactly at the junction between monophonic and polyphonic music - within a few years of her death in 1179 polyphonic music was being written down for the first time - and it would be fair to call her music the finest of its age, combining as it does unusually expressive poetry with unusually daring melodies. Superficially it sounds like plainchant, but it spans a greater range (over two octaves in many cases) than chant does, and the melody encompasses strange intervals unheard in simple chant. It has, as befits music based on visions, a fluid texture. This is partly because the lines of poetry are uneven in length and have no particular meter and partly because the lines often drift around a melisma - those beautiful moments when the melody floats around on one syllable - giving the music a mellifluous, wordless feel. That it is usually performed by a female choir, or by high-pitched tenor voices, singing in unison, adds to the effect. However, it also has a slightly more jagged edge for those who wish to listen a bit more closely.
Medieval music is based on a series of scales derived from Pythagoras, who was held in almost unholy awe in medieval times. To a modern ear, used to major and minor scales, these medieval scales, which sound very like scales made up of only the white notes on a piano, sound almost comical. Hildegard, with only a rudimentary education would have been aware of these modes, but not of the "correct" style of using them. Hence her music makes wild jumps, regularly up fourths and fifths. Similarly her poetry, which betrays an inexact grasp of Latin (a deficiency of which she was well aware) is interesting because she used the language in ways hitherto unexplored.
And therein lies the cause of both her lengthy obscurity and her recent revival. Her work has traditionally been seen as being of interest only within the context of her day. Most were unconvinced that monophonic music could be fundamentally interesting, without the tension created by harmony. Only recently, with interest extending beyond the core repertoire and the general interest in aspects of music other than harmony, has her work been studied. Her music is preserved whole in various Benedictine monasteries in the Bingen region, written in the vague manner of the day, which seems to act as more of a memory aid than strict notation. Surprisingly, she wrote little liturgical music. Her music was mainly for the Divine Office, the services other than Mass that comprised the day's worship. Her larger work is a collection of hymns, antiphons, sequences and responsories, many of them for the Office for the feast days of her favourite saints, St Ursula and St Rupert. These are gathered together in a work she called Symphonia Harmoniae Caelestium Revalationum ("Symphony Of The Harmony Of Heavenly Revelations").
Much more fun is her other work Ordo Virturum, a sort of early music drama which is to opera what the miracle plays are to theatre. In it Virtue battles with the Devil for the Soul. Virtue sings in beautiful dramatic verse, much like a choir of angels would sing, while the Devil, being base and evil, can only grunt and holler in an unmusical way. I don't think that I'm giving away the ending by saying that Virtue wins.
The performance of her music is fertile ground for argument among scholars of performance practice, fuelled by the vague notation that made it impossible to know definitively what Hildegard's intentions were. Whether instruments should be employed is a moot point. Hildegard would obviously have been aware of various early string instruments, percussion and the organ. She may even, given her adventurous nature, have approved. But seeing as her music was performed exclusively by her own convent, the unaccompanied female choir seems the most appropriate ensemble for her music.
Whether or not her music should be purely monophonic is also a source of controversy. Some recent performances have embellished her work with various harmonies, but given the medieval preoccupation with melody, anything more than simple drones seems unconvincing.
The other great area of interest for Hildegard scholars is her status as the greatest female composer ever; in the 800 years that have followed none has achieved, or been allowed to achieve, the same level. Her uncompromisingly feminine view of the universe is undeniable. In an age where theology blamed Eve, and by extension womanhood, for the fall of man, this should not be underestimated.
But, given the nebulous nature of our knowledge of her age (even the dates of birth of the other great composers of the time, Perotin and Leonin, are uncertain), it is hard to come to any conclusions as to the culture in which she worked. Best just to give Hildegard her due as an important composer and savour what we know of her writings.
