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Chapter 12
Hooked on Ecstasy:
Performance ‘Practice’ and the Reception
of the Music of Hildegard of Bingen
Jennifer Bain

Timothy McGee, who has worked for decades on early music and performance
practice issues as both a scholar and an active music director, reminds us that there
doubtless was much variation in the way early music was originally performed:

That there is no single ‘right way’ to perform a composition of any era is one
of the beauties of the art. At any one point in history one can find substantial
variations in the interpretation of the repertory, and this is as true of the early
centuries as of any other era.

We can assume that in the early centuries there was as much variety in the voices
and styles of delivery as there is today, but we shall probably never know for
certain what was considered to be a standard of beautiful vocal sound – or even
whether there was a standard.

Although we can never know for certain if we have arrived at even one of the
possible ‘historically correct’ interpretations, it is important – as McGee’s output has
demonstrated – that we at least attempt to locate and reproduce early performance
styles. The variety of interpretation and style of vocal production characteristic of
the Middle Ages and Renaissance, along with our inability to recover those styles


  I wish to thank Maureen Epp, Simon Docking and William Flynn for providing
comments and criticism of earlier drafts of this essay, and David Hiley for sharing some
of his unpublished material and for planting the seed of this essay with a paper given at the
Medieval and Renaissance Music Conference, University of Bristol, July 2002. Numerous
students and faculty at the Sydney Conservatorium and the University of New South Wales in
Sydney, Australia, also supplied valuable feedback at earlier presentations of this material. All
infelicities and errors that remain are, of course, my own. Funding for this project came in part
from a Research Development Fund Faculty Research Grant at Dalhousie University.
Quote is from Timothy J. McGee, Medieval and Renaissance Music: A Performer’s
Guide (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1985), 4.

 Ibid., 55.

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254 The Sounds and Sights of Performance in Early Music
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absolutely, tends to result in an even wider range of interpretation when the music
is revived in modern performances, and reconstructions can in turn profoundly
shape our understanding of the music. Perhaps the most extreme example can be
found in the 30-plus recordings of the music of Hildegard of Bingen currently
available.
The Hildegard revival was remarkably rapid. Although she warranted three
pages in the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians in 1980, in 1981 she
was still such an obscure figure in early music circles that her name, unlike that of
Leoninus, Perotinus, Notker Balbulus and Guillaume de Machaut, does not appear
in Jerome and Elizabeth Roche’s A Dictionary of Early Music. But by the 900-year
anniversary of Hildegard’s birth in 1998, there existed more than 30 recordings
of her chant, and her music was widely anthologized in undergraduate music
textbooks. In 2001, one of her chants was featured in the Hollywood hit movie
A Beautiful Mind: just after mathematician John Nash commits his first social
blunder at Princeton University, alienating himself from the other students at an
outdoor reception, a drone begins non-diagetically, taken from the Gothic Voices’
recording of Columba aspexit. The music continues diagetically in the following
scene, emerging (anachronistically) from a 78 rpm recording at a pivotal moment
in the narrative structure of the film; it is only much later that we realize that
Nash’s ‘roommate’ – who first appears in this scene, turning off the record player
as he enters the room – is in fact a kin­d of vision, a figment of Nash’s imagination.
The use of a Hildegard chant at this crucial moment in the film seems to be a clear
attempt to associate Hildegard’s status as an ecstatic, a seer of visions (which
Oliver Sacks, following Charles Singer, famously attributed to her experience
of migraines) with Nash’s status as a ‘visionary’ schizophrenic. This study will
focus on one particular feature of Hildegard’s remarkable revival: how not only
Hildegard herself but also her chant came to be described as ‘ecstatic’. I argue
that it is certain recordings of Hildegard, especially in comparison to recordings


  Jerome and Elizabeth Roche, A Dictionary of Early Music: From the Troubadours
to Monteverdi (London: Faber Music, 1981); Ian D. Bent, ‘Hildegard of Bingen’, The New
Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (London: Macmillan, 1980), 8:553–56. Hildegard
does not appear at all in the 1906 and 1939 editions of Grove’s Dictionary of Music and
Musicians (though Leoninus and Perotinus make their first entry in 1939), but she does
finally enter in 1954. In the second edition of The New Grove, the revised Hildegard article
is twice as long and uses more recent research to provide a context for Hildegard. Ian D.
Bent and Marianne Pfau, ‘Hildegard of Bingen’, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and
Musicians, 2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 2001), 11:493–99.

 From Gothic Voices, A Feather on the Breath of God (audio recording). Hyperion
66039, 1982.

  Oliver Sacks, ‘The Visions of Hildegard’, in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for
a Hat and Other Clinical Tales (New York: Touchstone Books, 1985), 166–70; Charles
Singer, ‘The Scientific Views and Visions of Saint Hildegard (1198–80)’, in Studies in the
History and Method of Science, ed. Charles Singer, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955;
first published 1917), 1–58.

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of medieval chant that pre-date the Hildegard revival, that are responsible for this
description, rather than the music itself within its historical context.
The first English-language references to Hildegard’s music mention only that
it exists, not what it is like. The English-language revival of Hildegard originated
largely with the efforts of scholars in a variety of disciplines involved in the
recovery of women’s history, one of the many activities of the women’s movement.
In 1896, Lina Eckenstein, a member of the Fabian Society and an amateur scholar,
wrote a substantial book on the history of women and monasticism, devoting
20 pages to Hildegard and her writings in the context of her political influence.
About Hildegard’s music she says only that ‘during the early part of her stay on the
Rupertsberg Hildegard also wrote a book of Latin texts for hymns (before 1153)
which are accompanied by musical notation’. It is clear from Eckenstein’s many
references to Johann Philipp Schmelzeis’s monumental biography, Das Leben und
Wirken der heiligen Hildegardis nach den Quellen dargestellt, that she would have
seen the modern transcriptions of several chants of Hildegard published as an
appendix to that work, but she makes no comment on the style of music. While
in 1899 George Upton makes no reference at all to Hildegard in the sixth edition
of his influential Woman in Music, towards the middle of the twentieth century
Sophie Drinker does. Drinker is another amateur scholar devoted to the recovery
of women’s history and the uncovering of ‘the repression of women by the
patriarchal culture pattern’.10 In a few pages of Music and Women, she celebrates
the originality of Hildegard’s liturgical drama, the Ordo Virtutum, as well as her
fame as a prophetess in the twelfth century:11

Her Play of the Virtues (Ordo Virtutem [sic]) is unique in the history of medieval
music. There is no other liturgical drama of her era or before, that treats spiritual


  Lina Eckenstein, Woman under Monasticism: Chapters on Saint-Lore and Convent
Life between A.D. 500 and A.D. 1500 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1896),
256–77. For further biographical information about Eckenstein, see Penelope Johnson,
‘Two Women Scholars Look at Medieval Nuns: Lina Eckenstein and Jo Ann McNamara’,
Magistra 3, no. 2 (1997): 30–47, especially 32–40.

  Eckenstein, Woman under Monasticism, 270.

  J. Ph. Schmelzeis, Das Leben und Wirken der heiligen Hildegardis nach den
Quellen dargestellt (Freiburg im Breisgau: Herder’sche Verlagshandlung, 1879).

  Although Upton ‘recovers’ the names of many female composers, the goal of his
book is to put forward the idea that the great contribution of women to music is in their role
as ‘muse’ to male composers and as performers and interpreters of music. George P. Upton,
Woman in Music, 6th ed. (Chicago: A.C. McClurg and Company, 1899).
10
  Sophie Hutchinson Drinker, unpublished memoir, untitled typescript, 195, cited
by Ruth Solie in ‘Afterword: Sophie Drinker’s Achievement’, in Sophie Drinker, Music
and Women: The Story of Women in Their Relation to Music, reprint ed. (New York: The
Feminist Press at The City University of New York, 1995), 325.
11
  Sophie Drinker, Music and Women: The Story of Women in their Relation to Music
(New York: Coward-McCann, 1948), especially 85–201.

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256 The Sounds and Sights of Performance in Early Music
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material as an allegory. Its whole conception is original. In its thought and text,
it contains the principles developed by Cavalieri four hundred years later in the
well-known Rappresentazione di Anime di Corpo. 12

For Drinker, the originality lies in the conception of the work as a morality play.
And although she continues her discussion of Hildegard by mentioning other
musical compositions and suggests that one of Hildegard’s sequences, ‘“O virga
[ac] diadema,” is still sung in the village church at Bingen and in other convents’,
she does not describe the music at all.13
Although many accounts in French and German appeared in the late nineteenth
century, descriptions of Hildegard’s music in English really began in the 1980s after
recordings started to appear in earnest, most notably after Gothic Voices produced
A Feather on the Breath of God.14 It is perhaps not surprising that as a visionary,
Hildegard has been described as an ‘ecstatic’. The terms, though, are not interchangeable;
Hildegard insisted that her visions never occurred in ecstasy, but rather while she
was awake.15 But as an adjectival description of her music, the word ecstatic appears
frequently in musical scholarship, in textbook descriptions of her music, and in reviews,
programme notes and CD liner notes. What follows is a sampling:

Hildegard’s seventy-odd musical compositions, published [sic] as the ‘Symphony


of the Harmony of Celestial Revelations’ are all monophonic sacred vocal works,
but they are chants with a twist. Full of brilliant poetic images, they feature wide
ranging, ornamented melodies and surprising leaps, creating a mood that might
be called ecstatic.
– Tower Records website16

12
 Ibid., 200.
13
 Ibid.
14
  See note 4, above.
15
  See Hildegard’s letter to Guibert of Gembloux (no. 103R) in L. Van Acker, ed.,
Hildegardis Bingensis: Epistolarium, Pars Secunda, Corpus Christianorum: continuatio
medievalis, 91A (Tournhout: Brepols, 1993), 261–62; and in English translation in Joseph
L. Baird and Radd K. Ehrman, The Letters of Hildegard of Bingen (New York and Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1998), 2:23 and 25, n. 3. I would like to thank Dr William T. Flynn
of Leeds University for graciously directing me to this passage.
16
 Describing Anonymous 4, Hildegard von Bingen: 11,000 Virgins: Chants for the Feast
of Saint Ursula (audio recording) Deutsche Harmonia Mundi HMU 907200, 1997. Excerpted
from Tower Records, http://www.towerrecords.com/product.aspx?pfid=2896988 (accessed 19
May 2004). Italics here and in the following quotations have been added for emphasis.

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In her antiphon O virtus sapientiae … the melody rises upwards in one of her
characteristic ecstatic openings at the announcement of the power of Wisdom.
– June Boyce-Tillman, ‘Hildegard of Bingen at 900:
The Eye of a Woman’, Musical Times 17

In the twelfth century, accounts of Ursula and her virgin army not only inspired
Hildegard to write the ecstatic chants included in this program, but they also
may have kindled certain visions of the mystic Elisabeth of Schönau … .
– CD liner notes, 11,000 Virgins by Anonymous 418

The chants composed by Hildegard have ecstatic passages that may include
leaps of an octave (eight notes) or more.
– Maureen McCarthy Draper, The Nature of
Music: Beauty, Sound, and Healing 19

Sheer musical excellence … Mr. Keene drew an intensity from his singers that
effectively tapped into both the meditative and ecstatic currents of the music.
– New York Times review20

This week’s program places the ecstatic works Hildegard composed for Ursula’s
feast day in their original liturgical setting so that modern listeners can, in the
words of Anonymous 4’s Susan Hellauer, ‘experience the powerful impression
they made on their first hearers, both as evocations of the holy events they
commemorate, and as pure works of art’.
– Minnesota Public Radio21

Her melodic contours are consistently original; being based on mystical visions,
they usually have an ecstatic quality.
– Todd McComb, Classical Net website22

17
  June Boyce-Tillman, ‘Hildegard of Bingen at 900: The Eye of a Woman’, Musical
Times 1865 (Winter 1998): 34.
18
  Marsha Genensky and Johanna Maria Rose, ‘The Legend of St. Ursula’, CD liner
notes, Anonymous 4, Hildegard von Bingen: 11,000 Virgins, 9.
19
 Maureen McCarthy Draper, The Nature of Music: Beauty, Sound, and Healing
(New York: Penguin Putnam, 2001), 112.
20
  The New York Times review of Voices of Ascension, From Chant to Renaissance,
Delos DE 3174, 1995. Excerpted from Delos, http://www.delosmus.com/item/de31/de3174.
html (accessed 19 May 2004).
21
 Minnesota Public Radio description of broadcast for 13 August 2000. Excerpted
from Saint Paul Sunday, http://saintpaulsunday.publicradio.org/listings/shows00_08.htm
(accessed 19 May 2004).
22
  Todd McComb, excerpted from ClassicalNet, http://www.classical.net/music/
comp.lst/hildgard.html (accessed 19 May 2004).

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The programme reveals the whole gamut of her output, from the musical play
which she wrote for the edification of the novices in her Benedictine abbey to
ecstatic melodies which were revolutionary in her own day and still astonish us
900 years later.
– Oxford Girls Choir23

‘Modal’ cadences … at the beginning of the melody … give it a deceptively


humble quality that contrasts with its ecstatic soaring later.
– Joseph Kerman and Gary Tomlinson, Listen24

But, above all, the liberation of Hildegard’s free and ecstatic melodies from the
accretions so foolishly added in so many present-day faddish treatments allows
these melodies to soar on their own terms.
– American Record Guide review25

The medieval German nun, Hildegard von Bingen (1098–1179), and the
contemporary American composer, Patricia Van Ness (b.1951), not only penned
these richly symbolic texts, but composed a kind of music at once ecstatic and
sublimely spiritual.
– CD liner notes, Sapphire Night by Tapestry26

Two CDs even carry references to ecstasy in their titles: Sequentia’s Canticles of
Ecstasy (1994) and the Coro Hildegard von Bingen’s Ecstatic Chants (1998).27
It is worth asking how Hildegard’s music came to be associated so strongly
with this ‘ecstatic’ label. In many of these excerpts, the ‘ecstasy’ is attributed to
the wide melodic range and ‘soaring’ passages in individual chants. Indeed, it is
typical of descriptions of Hildegard’s music to mention a wide range and large
leaps as indicative of her melodic style. In the liner notes of one CD, the author

23
  Description of Oxford Girls Choir programme, ‘Sibyl of the Rhine – The Life and
Music of Hildegard of Bingen’, performed at Holy Redeemer Church, Chelsea (24 October
1999), and Sarum College, Salisbury (26 October 1999), directed by Richard Vendome and
Penelope Martin-Smith. Excerpted from Oxford Girls Choir, http://www.oxfordgirlschoir.
co.uk/events/hildegard1999.pdf (accessed 10 June 2004).
24
  Joseph Kerman and Gary Tomlinson, Listen, Brief 4th ed. (Boston and New York:
Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2000), 51.
25
  Barker, review of Sinfonye, Aurora: The Complete Hildegard von Bingen, Volume
Two, Celestial Harmonies 13128, 2000.
Excerpted from Celestial Hamonies, http://www.harmonies.com/reviews/arg.htm
(accessed 10 June 2004).
26
  Tapestry, Sapphire Night (audio recording), MDG 344 1193–2, 2003, CD booklet, 4.
27
  Sequentia, Canticles of Ecstasy (audio recording), Deutsche Harmonia Mundi
05472 77320 2, 1994; Coro Hildegard von Bingen, Hildegard von Bingen: Ecstatic Chants
(audio recording), Fine Tune 1130-2, 1998.

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writes, ‘The common chant lines usually had a range of less than an octave, while
Hildegard’s vocal lines could cover two octaves and more.’28 Similarly, in the
introduction to her edition and translation of Hildegard’s poetry, Barbara Newman
describes Hildegard’s songs as having ‘an ambitus of two octaves and some even
of two and a half’.29 But how many of Hildegard’s chants actually span two or two
and one-half octaves? Of the 75 individual chants listed in Joseph Gmelch’s table
that identifies final as well as ambitus for each piece, only two span two octaves
and only one spans two and one-half octaves (see Table 12.1).30

Table 12.1 Range in Hildegard’s music

Range No. of chants No. of chants (percentage)


8th 3 10 10
9 th
7 (13%) (13%)

10th 9 30
11 th
21 (40%)
54
(72%)
12th 15 24
13 th
9 (32%)
14th 8
15th 2
16th 0 11 11
17th 0 (15%) (15%)
18th 0
19th 1

Even if we include the eight chants that encompass an octave plus a seventh, the
group of works that include a range of two to two and one-half octaves represents
just 15 per cent of Hildegard’s output. In fact, while no works of Hildegard span
less than an octave (unlike earlier chant repertory), more than 50 per cent of her
works fall into the range of an octave to an eleventh, a range readily accepted

28
 David Preiser, in Rosa Lamoreaux-Hesperus, Luminous Spirit: Chants of Hildegard
von Bingen (audio recording), KOCH 3–7443–2, 1998, CD booklet, 10.
29
  Barbara Newman, Introduction to Saint Hildegard of Bingen: Symphonia, a Critical
Edition of the ‘Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum [Symphony of the Harmony of
Celestial Revelations]’ (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1988), 28.
30
  Joseph Gmelch, Die Kompositionen der heil. Hildegard: Nach dem großen
Hildegardkodex in Wiesbaden phototypisch veröffentlicht (Düsseldorf: Schwann, 1913),
18–22. Gmelch enumerates 69 individual chants plus the Ordo virtutum, but he provides separate
ranges for each of the six antiphons included under ‘45. Studium divinitatis’ and for each of the
two antiphons included under ‘46. Deus enim’. The individual chants thus number 75 in total.

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by medieval writers and found in other newly written chant from the eleventh
and twelfth centuries, such as the much-anthologized eleventh-century Easter
sequence, Victimae paschali laudes, which extends to a range of an eleventh.
Indeed, medieval theorists as a matter of course describe chants that occupy
a range of an eleventh, and some suggest even wider ranges (both plagal and
authentic at once), a sure sign that the phenomenon is not that uncommon. Already
in the tenth century, Guido of Arezzo wrote in his Micrologus:

You should remember, furthermore, that authentic modes scarcely go more than
one note below their finals, as is shown by the testimony of the chants generally
used … . [The authentic modes] go up an octave or ninth or even a tenth.31

By including the note below the final, Guido suggests, the authentic modes
regularly may occupy a range of a ninth to an eleventh. The plagal mode, he states,
can occupy a ninth or a tenth:

Plagal modes, however, go down and up a fifth. Yet the sixth above is also
allowed by the authorities, as are the ninth and tenth in authentic modes.32

Guido then moves from a theoretical description of mode to a description of what


actually happens sometimes in the chant repertory, implying that some chants
exceed the ranges he has described:

However, you will find a number of chants in which the low and the high are
so intermingled that one cannot make out whether they should be assigned to
authentic or plagal.33

Such chants might then occupy ranges greater than a tenth or eleventh.
Around 1100, the theorist John, whom Claude Palisca identifies as part of
a Germanic group including Berno of Reichenau and Hermannus Contractus,34

31
  Guido of Arezzo, ‘Micrologus’, in Hucbald, Guido and John on Music: Three
Medieval Treatises, ed. with introductions Claude V. Palisca, trans. Warren Babb (New
Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1978), 69.
32
 Ibid.
33
 Ibid.
34
  Palisca’s reasons are many. In Hucbald, Guido and John, he argues that John shows
an acquaintance with the interval notation of Hermannus Contractus (91); explains the
Romanic letters, the litterae significativae, ‘rarely encountered outside Southern Germany
and Metz’ (91); uses Greek names, which is ‘more characteristic of German authors than
Italians or French’(91); cites rare chants that seem to come from the Hartker Antiphonal
(92); cites the didactic chants of Hermannus (92); and names Berno and Hermannus (93). He
argues that Berno and Hermannus were probably little known outside of Germanic regions,

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similarly describes modal ranges of a tenth or eleventh (again taking into account
the note below the final for authentic modes):

All the authentic modes regularly ascend an octave – that is, a diapason – above
their finals, and, by way of license, a ninth or tenth … All the plagal modes,
however, ascend as far as a fifth, that is, a diapente, from the final, and by way of
license they add the sixth … . On the other hand, all the plagal modes descend a
fourth, that is, a diatessaron, or even a fifth from the final by rule.35

Marchetto of Padua, writing close to two centuries after Hildegard’s death,


but nevertheless writing about plainchant, describes similar modal ranges,
characteristically categorizing the ranges into five groups: perfect, imperfect,
pluperfect, mixed or mingled. Perfect modes ‘fill their measure’, occupying
Marchettus’s standard range of a ninth for authentic or plagal modes (a whole
tone below to an octave above for authentic, a fourth below and a sixth above for
plagal), while imperfect modes use a smaller range.36 Pluperfect authentic modes
extend their range further by going more than an octave above the final (resulting
in a tenth or eleventh), while pluperfect plagal modes extend further than a fourth
below the final (resulting in more than a ninth). Mixed modes extend their range in
the other direction (authentic modes reaching further below the final, plagal further
above), so that authentic and plagal are mixed, resulting in a tenth or more.37
It is significant that over half of Hildegard’s output – those chants that occupy
an octave to an eleventh – falls easily within the normal ranges described by
medieval writers about plainchant, while a third – those chants that occupy a 12th
to 13th– falls into a range that is less common but still acknowledged by medieval
writers, Guido’s chants that are ‘so intermingled’ and Marchettus’s modes that
are ‘mixed’. What distinguishes Hildegard’s works from earlier repertory, then, is
not their ranges per se, but the distribution of those ranges: she has no works with
a range of less than an octave, the bulk of her repertory lies between a 10th and
13th, and she has a small group of works (just 15 per cent) that exceeds the ranges
generally found in earlier and concurrent repertory.
The other element of melodic style frequently associated with Hildegard’s
‘ecstatic’ music is the use of large leaps, particularly fifths. As Newman writes,
‘Also notable are the wide melodic leaps, especially the frequent ascending and
descending fifths. Hildegard had a way of scurrying rapidly up and down the

because 11 of the 13 manuscripts that contain Berno’s treatise originated in German areas
(93) and Hermannus’s treatise survives in only two copies today (94).
35
  John, ‘On Music (De musica)’, Hucbald, Guido and John, 122–23.
36
  See Marchetto of Padua, Lucidarium, ed. and trans. Jan Herlinger (Chicago and
London: University of Chicago Press, 1985): 379–89, for his discussion of modal range.
37
  Marchetto’s final category, mingled, refers to chants that occupy two entirely
different modes, i.e. that are not the plagal and authentic of each other (389–91).

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262 The Sounds and Sights of Performance in Early Music
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octave … several times in the space of a word.’38 While Newman exaggerates
somewhat – rarely does Hildegard go up and down an octave several times in the
space of a single word – the emphasis on the fifth and octave and use of melodic
leaps are characteristic of Hildegard’s musical style. Her musical settings, in
fact, strikingly resemble in both range and melodic motion those by theorist and
composer Hermannus Contractus (1013–54), strongly suggesting that Hildegard’s
style, rather than expressing musical individuality, was perhaps more in keeping
with a Germanic monastic tradition than previously thought.39
Until very recently, little of Hermannus’s music, most of which comprises
Offices for regional saints, was known.40 As Andrew Hughes wrote in 1989, few
scholars ‘have ever considered the largest of all repertories of monophonic music,
plainsongs written from tenth to sixteenth century for the Offices’, a repertory
that Hughes estimates contains some 30,000 tunes.41 David Hiley suggests that
this neglect of the Offices is understandable when one considers that ‘such chants

38
 Newman, Symphonia, 29.
39
  This connection between Hermannus and Hildegard was first made in 1911 when
Johannes May compared Hildegard’s O clarissima mater with the Marian antiphon Salve
regina, which he ascribes to Hermannus (‘Klingen diese Akkorde nicht wie eine Variation des
Salve Regina, das ein Jahrhundert früher der Monch Herimann der Lahme auf der Reichenau
gesungen hat?’). Although that attribution no longer stands (see note 40, below), Salve regina
– like many chants found in the repertories of both Hildegard and Hermannus – emphasizes
the final and its fifth, demonstrated even in its opening gesture (for further connections with
Marian antiphons see Margot Fassler, who convincingly presents Hildegard’s O nobilissima
viriditas as a reworking of Ave regina celorum). More recently, William Flynn compares
Hildegard’s O frondens virga with Hermannus’s Gaudeat tota virgo mater ecclesia and
shows how Hildegard ‘could have [been] deeply influenced’ by Hermannus Contractus
in both his theoretical and musical practices. I am indebted to William Flynn for sharing
with me his unpublished manuscript ‘Hildegard’s music in context: The compositions
and theory of Hermannus Contractus?’ and for directing me to Fassler’s discussion of Ave
regina celorum. Johannes May, Die heilige Hildegard von Bingen, Aus dem Orden des
heiligen Benedikt, 1098–1179: Ein Lebensbild (Munich: Verlag Josef Kösel & Friedrich
Pustet, 1911), 211; and Margot Fassler, ‘Composer and Dramatist: “Melodious Singing
and the Freshness of Remorse”’, in Voice of the Living Light: Hildegard of Bingen and her
World, ed. Barbara Newman (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1998), 152–54, 166–68.
40
  Beyond the three Historiae for which David Hiley has prepared editions (Wolfgang,
2002; Afra, 2004; and the forthcoming Magnus), Hiley cites only three music-didactic pieces
and five sequences that can be attributed certainly to Hermannus, and confirms the controversy
that surrounds the ascription of the Marian antiphons Salve regina and Alma redemptoris
mater to Hermannus. See Hermannus Contractus (1013–54), Historia sancti Wolfgangi
episcopi ratisbonensis, ed. and introduction David Hiley (Ottawa: Institute of Mediaeval
Music, 2002), xxv; and Historia sanctae Afrae martyris Augustensis, ed. and introduction
David Hiley and Walter Berschin (Ottawa: Institute of Mediaeval Music, 2004).
41
 Andrew Hughes, Style and Symbol, Medieval Music: 800–1453 (Ottawa: Institute
of Mediaeval Music, 1989), xxi.

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were for a long time of only secondary interest, attention being centred instead on
restoring what could be used in the Roman liturgy of the twentieth century’.42
For Hermannus in particular, the three Historia[e] edited by Hiley vastly augment
what we know of his compositional style43 and reveal Hermannus’s melodies as
‘strikingly original in character’.44 Relating Hermannus’s compositions to his
modal theory, Hiley emphasizes the importance of the Ecktöne, the first and last
tones of the species of fourths, fifths and octaves that make up the governing modes
(in D mode these would be A, D, a, d, and possibly aa as well): ‘this classification
of song phrases in outlined segments of fifths and fourths is not only characteristic
for many of the Afra and Wolfgang Offices but also directly emphasized’.45
Not only do all of Hermannus’s phrases end on Ecktöne, but ‘the majority of

42
 In a series of articles and editions, Hiley has done much to reverse the trend of
neglecting Office chants: in addition to the editions mentioned in note 40, above, Hiley
has also published ‘The Regensburg Offices for St. Emmeram, St. Wolfgang and St.
Denis’, Musica Antiqua X. 10th International Musicological Congress ‘Musica Antiqua
Europae Orientalis’ Bydgoszcz, September 7th–11th 1994 (Bydogoszcz: Filharmonia,1994),
299–312; Historia Sancti Emmerammi Arnoldi Vohburgensis circa 1030, Wissenschaftliche
Abhandlungen/Musicological Studies 65/2 (Ottawa: Institute for Mediaeval Music, 1996);
‘Die Gesänge des Offiziums in Festivitate Sanctorum Septem Fratrum in der Ottobeurer
Handschrift München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Clm 9921, um 1150’, in Artes liberales:
Karlheinz Schlager zum 60. Geburtstag, ed. Marcel Dobberstein, Eichstätter Abhandlungen
zur Musikwissenschaft 13 (Tutzing: H. Schneider, 1998), 13–35; ‘Das Wolfgang-Offizium
des Hermannus Contractus – Zum Wechselspiel von Modustheorie und Gesangspraxis in
der Mitte des XI. Jahrhunderts’, in Die Offizien des Mittelalters: Dichtung und Musik, ed.
Walter Berschin and David Hiley, Regensburger Studien zur Musikgeschichte 1 (Tutzing:
Schneider, 1999), 129–42; ‘The Historia of St. Julian of Le Mans by Letald of Micy: Some
Comments and Questions about a North French Office of the Early Eleventh Century’, in
The Divine Office in the Latin Middle Ages: Methodology and Source Studies, Regional
Developments, Hagiography. Written in Honor of Professor Ruth Steiner, ed. Margot E.
Fassler and Rebecca A. Baltzer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 444–62; ‘The
Music of Prose Offices in Honour of English Saints’, Plainsong and Medieval Music 10
(2001): 23–37; and ‘Die Afra-Gesänge des Hermannus Contractus. Liturgische Melodien
und die Harmonie des Universums’, in Hl. Afra. Eine frühchristliche Märtyrerin in
Geschichte, Kunst und Kult, ed. Manfred Weitlauff and Melanie Thierbach (Lindenberg:
J. Fink, 2004), 112–19.
43
 Hiley attributes the 36 melodies of the Historia Sancti Wolfgangi Episcopi Ratisbonensis
to Hermannus ‘with complete certainty’. ‘Hiley, introduction to Hermannus Contractus, Historia
sancti Wolfgangi, xxii.
44
 Hiley and Berschin, introduction to Hermannus Contractus, Historia sanctae Afrae, 5.
45
  Hiley, ‘Das Wolfgang-Offizium des Hermannus Contractus’, 131: ‘diese Einteilung
der Gesangsphrasen in von Quinten bzw. Quarten umrissene Segmente ist für viele Gesänge
der Afra- und Wolfgang-Offizien nicht nur charakteristisch, sondern wird geradezu betont’
(all translations mine).

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264 The Sounds and Sights of Performance in Early Music
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individual words, that is, the small phrases also end on these tones’.46 Often these
tones are emphasized by leaping from final to fifth, particularly in the F and G
modes. Leaps such as these are found in the older Gregorian repertory in F mode
in particular, but Hiley suggests that they happen more vigorously in Hermannus’s
works: ‘The Responsorium Prudens economus [see excerpt in Example 12.3(a)
below] from the Wolfgang Office swings with much energy between two primary
tones, and aims more frequently for the high f and sometimes g than in the older
repertory.’47 Hiley concludes:

these characteristics are by no means limited to Hermannus’s songs. Experience


with other Offices of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries shows, however,
that Hermannus went further than his contemporaries in this direction, itself
suggesting that these characteristics can be traced back to his own musical-
theoretic activity.48

Other Office repertory from the eleventh to thirteenth centuries includes


the output of Hildegard, and indeed her works – as many authors have noted –
emphasize the final, and its fifth and octave. As early as 1922, Ludwik Bronarski,
in his study Die Lieder der hl. Hildegard, describes this emphasis:

[T]here are motives which leaving and returning to the tonic merely play about
it; analogous motives appear on the dominant. Others move from the tonic to the
dominant; these are obviously especially important as elements of construction.
Again others lead from the dominant to the tonic … .49

Leaps of fifths are used often as opening gestures, typically when the chant begins
with the exclamation ‘O’, or with the salutation, ‘Ave’, but appear throughout her

46
  Ibid., 141: ‘Die Mehrheit der einzelnen Worte bzw. kleinen Phrasen endet auch auf
diesen Tönen.’
47
  Ibid., 139: ‘Das Responsorium Prudens economus aus dem Wolfgang-Offizium
schwingt viel energischer zwischen diesen zwei Haupt-tönen … und zielt häufiger als im
alten Repertoire auf das hohe f und sogar g.’
48
  Ibid., 141: ‘dieses Charakteristikum keineswegs auf die Gesänge Hermanns
beschränkt. Die Erfahrung mit anderen Offizien des 10.–12. Jahrhundert bestätigt jedoch,
daß Hermannus weiter als seine Zeitgenossen in diese Richtung gegangen ist, und es liegt
nahe, dies auf seine musiktheoretische Beschäftigung zurückzuführen.’
49
  Ludwik Bronarski, Die Lieder der hl. Hildegard: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte
der geistlichen Musik des Mittelalters (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel, 1922), 49: ‘es
gibt Motive, welche von der Tonika ausgehend und mit ihr schließend, diese lediglich
umspielen; analoge Motive erscheinen auf der Dominante; andere gehen von der Tonika aus
und wenden sich zur Dominante, diese sind natürlich als constructive Elemente besonders
wichtig; wieder andere führen von der Dominante zur Tonika’. Jennifer Bain, ‘Selected
Antiphons of Hildegard von Bingen: Notation and Structural Design’ (MA thesis, McGill
University, 1995), 19–21.

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Hooked on Ecstasy 265
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works as well (see Examples 12.1(a) and 12.1(b), and brackets marked (i) and (ii)
in Example 12.2). Although Hermannus rarely uses leaps of a fifth or octave as an
opening gesture, he does, as Hiley elucidates, use them throughout his music (see
brackets marked (i) and (ii) in Examples 12.3 and 12.5). Hildegard and Hermannus
share other characteristic melodic gestures as well, outlined in Example 12.1, that
normally occur on specific scale steps above the final. As a variation of the fifth-
plus-fourth gesture, Hildegard frequently fills in the upper fourth with a third
before reaching the octave (see Example 12.1(c) and Example 12.2(a)), which
Hermannus does as well (see Example 12.3(b)). Two further gestures are shared
between Hildegard and Hermannus (Example 12.1(d) and 12.1(e)), as can be seen
in Examples 12.4 and 12.5.

Example 12.1 Melodic gestures found in both Hildegard and Hermannus

In addition to sharing melodic gestures at the level of the motive, Hildegard


and Hermannus also show striking similarities in their melodic organization at
the level of the phrase, as demonstrated through a comparison of a few phrases of
Hildegard’s O Jerusalem, aurea civitas in Example 12.4 with several phrases of
Hermannus’s Eximie presul et pie pastor in Example 12.5. In these two works, both
composers shape their phrases around the final, its fifth above and fourth below,
and the octave above (see the reductions below each set of phrases), cadencing at
the end of every phrase on Hiley’s Ecktöne.50 As well, both composers reach past
the fifth to the seventh above the final in an earlier phrase, finally attaining the
octave only later in the piece.
The two composers also share a similar approach to range. Like Hildegard,
Hermannus has no chants in his Wolfgang and Afra Offices that occupy a range
less than an octave (a feature of earlier Gregorian repertory), and the bulk of his
music falls within the range of a tenth or eleventh (see Table 12.2). Although he
never ventures quite as far as Hildegard, having no chants that span a 14th, 15th, or
19th, even for Hildegard that extreme range is much less common. He does exploit,
however, the range of a 12th to 13th, which is much less usual in earlier repertory.

50
  Before Hiley’s editions and analyses of Hermannus appeared, I had described
already the importance of the final, fifth and octave in Hildegard’s music in detailed
analytical discussions of five of her antiphons in my master’s thesis, particularly in chs 3
and 4. Bain, ‘Selected Antiphons of Hildegard von Bingen’, 31–73, examples on 82–97.

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266 The Sounds and Sights of Performance in Early Music
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Example 12.2 Excerpts from four chants of Hildegard51

(a)

(b)

(c)

(d)

Given the similarities of range and melodic style in the music of Hildegard
and Hermannus, we must return to and expand our first question.51 Why does
Hildegard’s music retain the descriptor ‘ecstatic’ but not Hermannus’s? Since
modern editions of Hermannus’s music appeared only recently, it might seem an
unfair question. But Hildegard’s current reputation began with Gothic Voices’
inaugural recording, A Feather on the Breath of God, which debuted well ahead
of any accessible editions of Hildegard’s music in modern notation, and continued
with the numerous recordings of Sequentia Ensemble. Without the personal appeal
of Hildegard as a prolific and strong-willed female visionary and composer,

51
  ‘D’ refers to the Hildegard manuscript Dendermonde, St.-Pieters & Paulusabdij,
MS. Cod. 9, available in facsimile edition as Hildegard of Bingen, Symphonia Harmoniae
Caelestium Revelationum, introduction Peter van Poucke (Peer: Alamire, 1991), while
‘R’ refers to the Hildegard manuscript Wiesbaden, Landesbibliothek, Handschrift 2
(‘Riesencodex’), available in facsimile edition as Hildegard von Bingen, Lieder: Faksimile
Riesencodex (Hs. 2) der Hessischen Landesbibliothek Wiesbaden, fol. 466–481v, ed. Lorenz
Welker with commentary by Michael Klaper (Reichert Verlag, 1998).

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Example 12.3 Excerpts from three chants of Hermannus52

(a)

(b)

(c)

Hermannus likely will never receive the attention that Hildegard has from the
recording industry. Despite Gothic Voices’ director Christopher Page’s assertion
in the liner notes that ‘Hildegard’s writing suggests a quiet mastery that controls
ecstasy and shuns delirium’,53 his performance choices arguably created the
ecstatic quality associated with Hildegard’s music. Daniel Leech-Wilkinson has
claimed that ‘nothing since Riemann has so much reshaped the performance and
perception of medieval music as the work, and above all the recordings of Gothic

52
  All transcriptions of Hermannus are taken from Hermannus Contractus, Historia
sancti Wolfgangi episcopi ratisbonensis, ed. David Hiley
53
 Christopher Page, liner notes to Gothic Voices, A Feather on the Breath of God, 5.

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268 The Sounds and Sights of Performance in Early Music
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Example 12.4 Hildegard, excerpt from O Jerusalem, aurea civitas with
reduction

Voices’.54 Although Leech-Wilkinson was specifically describing the impact of


Gothic Voices’ performances and recordings of medieval polyphony, I would
extend that impact to the performance and perception of the music of Hildegard
as well.
To understand the impact of Gothic Voices’ 1981 recording, it would be useful
to review the treatment of Hildegard’s music in earlier recordings. Chant recordings
before Gothic Voices (and many since as well) typically featured monks (and
nuns) singing in groups rather methodically, in the middle ranges of their voices
with limited rhythmic variation. Arguably, if Hildegard’s music had been recorded
in this style only, it would never have attracted the attention it has received nor its
‘ecstatic’ label. Indeed, earlier recordings of Hildegard had virtually no impact in
the early music community or in the marketplace at large. Jerome Weber reports
that the first recording of Hildegard’s music was of her Kyrie in 1948, by monks at

54
  Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, The Modern Invention of Medieval Music: Scholarship,
Ideology, Performance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 111.

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Example 12.5 Hermannus, excerpt from Eximie presul et pie pastor with
reduction

St Benoît du Lac, a monastery in Quebec (regionally famous now for its cheese).55
In 1960, the Aachen Cathedral Choir and Symphony Orchestra released a recording
that included their (rather dreadful) arrangement and performance of O virga ac
diadema, while the nuns in Rüdesheim at the modern Hildegard Abbey released
recordings under the direction of Cecilia Bonn in 1972 and under Immaculata
Ritscher in 1979.56 As Weber indicates, ‘they sing Hildegard’s music in a style

55
  Jerome Weber, “Hildegard Regarded and Recorded,” Early Music America 1, no.1
(1995): 40. Monks of Saint-Benoît-du-Lac, Québec, Canada, Chants grégoriens, Cantilènes
Sacrées 109 (audio recording; 78 rpm), 1948.
56
 Aachen Cathedral Choir, Sacred Music of the Masters (audio recording), Columbia
C–80102, 1960; Caecilia Bonn and Schola der Benediktinerinnenabtei Rüdesheim-
Eibingen, Psallite (audio recording), PEX 138/250973, 1972; and M. Immaculata Ritscher
and Schola der Benediktinerinnenabtei St. Hildegard, Hildegard: Symphoniae harmoniae
caelestium revelationum (audio recording), Bayer 100 116, 1979.

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270 The Sounds and Sights of Performance in Early Music
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Table 12.2 Range comparison in Hildegard and Hermannus (Wolfgang and Afra)

Range 8th–9th (%) 10th–11th (%) 12th–13th (%) 14th–19th (%)


Hildegard 13 40 32 15
Hermannus 33 48 19 0

much like that of Solesmes’;57 certainly in their third recording in 1997, under the
direction of Johannes Berchmans Göschl, the Schola der Benediktinerinnenabtei
St Hildegard uses a Solesmes style, in which they group notes rhythmically in
twos and threes and hold notes at the end of phrases a little longer, but with no
great rhythmic variety or display of virtuosic technique.58 In the accompanying
CD booklet, Göschl directly addresses the subject of rhythmic interpretation and
virtuosic performance, and repeatedly takes issue with the ‘showy virtuosity’ that
results often from a mensural approach to rhythm.59 Rejecting also the authenticity
of an equal-value approach to rhythm, he suggests that it is at least a better reflection
of ‘the spiritual dimensions inherent in Hildegard’s songs’.60 Göschl’s objection
to virtuosity is above all an objection to the notion that professionally trained
voices are necessary for the performance of Hildegard’s music: ‘to postulate that
the Hildegard songs were originally performed with professional polish, would
be to deny the real conditions prevailing in convents, then or at the present
time’.61 While agreeing that professional voices are not necessary – although they
produce beautiful and engaging renditions – I suggest that these performances by
professional singers have had a profound effect on the way Hildegard’s music has
been disseminated and received. Despite Hildegard’s clear historical significance,
rather than Hildegard herself it is Gothic Voices and Sequentia who have created

57
  Weber, ‘Hildegard Regarded and Recorded’, 40.
58
  The ‘Solesmes style’ is that advocated by Dom André Mocquereau (1849–1930),
outlined in great detail at the beginning of the Solesmes editions (described by Richard Crocker
as an approach that is ‘personal’ rather than ‘philological’ – see his Introduction to Gregorian
Chant (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 166). Rhythmic marks appear in the
Solesmes editions, most significantly a horizontal line above a note (an episema) that indicates
a slight lengthening, while a short vertical stroke below a note (an ictus) indicates where ‘beat’
1 is in a group of two or three. The result aurally is a sense of a series of varied accents.
59
  Johannes Göschl, in Schola der Benediktinerinnenabtei, Hildegard von Bingen:
O Vis Aeternitatis (audio recording), Ars Musici, AM 1203–2, CD booklet, 23. He describes
the ‘sophisticated virtuosity’ of the ‘many-faceted mensural approach’ (22) and advocates
‘avoiding virtuosic presentation’ (23). Concluding that it is ‘improbable that Hildegard
the composer envisaged her songs being performed with showy virtuosity’ (23), he states
strongly that, ‘[t]rue mysticism and showmanship are two quite different worlds, mutually
exclusive’ (24). His approach is to ‘endeavour to reconstruct the vocal aesthetics of
Gregorian chant by applying the basic principles of Gregorian semiology’ (26).
60
 Ibid., 23.
61
 Ibid., 24.

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her ‘ecstatic’ chants. Many performers and scholars since have used the notion of
ecstasy as a ‘hook’ to promote her music.
Gothic Voices brought to their recording of Hildegard professional singers,
expertise in the performance of early music, and the reputations of both the singers
and their director, Christopher Page. A Feather on the Breath of God was Gothic
Voices’ first recording, but the individual members were certainly not unknown
in England. The group was created when Christopher Page, already a respected
academic, produced a pair of broadcasts on the BBC in January and February of
1981, proposing a new style of singing for medieval polyphony using all-voice
ensembles, rather than a mixture of solo voice with instruments.62 The singers
on the original LP included soprano Emma Kirkby, who sang with the Taverner
Consort and the Consort of Musicke in the 1970s and had recorded with the
Academy of Ancient music; contralto Margaret Philpot, who had sung with Musica
Reservata; and tenor Andrew Parrott, who had worked with Musica Reservata and
who directed the Taverner Consort.63
Whereas many previous recordings of chant were produced by monastic
groups – monks for the most part, but also occasionally nuns – perhaps trained in
the Solesmes style of singing chant but not as professional singers, Gothic Voices
brought to Hildegard’s chant professionally trained voices particularly experienced
in the singing of early music. Using both male and female voices, though never
together in a single track, Gothic Voices adopts a rapid tempo and a rhythmically
animated performance style. Although they opt for relatively consistent note
lengths, they accentuate certain pitches, creating rhythmic groupings of two and
three as the Solesmes style advocates, but creating a strong rhythmic impulse to
the music that most earlier recordings lack. The penultimate note of individual
phrases is often held longer to shape the endings rather than the final note, which
happens frequently in Solesmes-style performances; otherwise, longer notes are
only sung if the original notation indicates the same pitch twice neumatically on a
single syllable. Importantly, the timbre adopted by the singers has the control of a
professional sound, yet it does not have an operatic quality, partly because of the
lack of vibrato. Soloists are used frequently on this recording, but when groups are
used instead the ensemble is so tight that it has the quality of a solo performance.
Moreover, the tracks that feature Emma Kirkby, Emily van Evera and Margaret
Philpot as soloists, along with Poppy Holden and Judith Stell in small groups,
often place the songs in their upper registers, creating a style of chant performance
in 1982 that is remarkably original.64

62
  Leech-Wilkinson, The Modern Invention, 113–15.
63
 Ibid., 114.
64
 For further discussion of a wide variety of Hildegard recordings, especially in
relation to their marketing, see Jennifer Bain, ‘Hildegard on 34th Street: Chant in the
Marketplace’, Echo: A Music-Centered Journal 6, no.1 (2004), http://www.echo.ucla.edu/
volume6-issue1/bain/bain1.html (accessed 24 November 2005).

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272 The Sounds and Sights of Performance in Early Music
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The impact of Gothic Voices is apparent in later recordings by other ensembles
and individuals who have perpetuated and expanded on this performance style
and image of Hildegard’s music. Sequentia, for example, whose first recording
of Hildegard (the Ordo virtutum) also appeared in 1982, and who undertook the
(still incomplete) project of recording all of Hildegard’s works, uses a similar
performance style but with more explicit virtuosity, singing with a much more
flexible rhythmic interpretation and creating rapid runs and turns.65 Their numerous
Hildegard recordings have had wide distribution and influence in Europe and
North America, and their members have given workshops in performance practice,
directly influencing the way that singers approach the music of Hildegard.66 From
Chant to Renaissance, a CD produced by an excellent New York choir, Voices of
Ascension, includes two chants by Hildegard, both sung as solos by Kathy Theil
in a high register with a rhythmic interpretation close to the style of Sequentia.67
Perhaps the most extreme example of this style is a recording by Tapestry, in which
Christi Catt takes Nunc gaudeant to a very high register vocally and imposes an
expansive rhythmic style.68
Although the small group of works of Hildegard that occupy a range of a 14th
to 15th – and of course the one anomaly that stretches to a 19th – differ from earlier
Gregorian repertory and from other newly composed chant repertory from the
time period, her music otherwise may not be as original as previously thought.
Her works certainly share many features of melodic construction with the works
of Hermannus Contractus composed a century earlier and may very well be
somewhat typical of Office repertory from the eleventh to thirteenth centuries,
which will only be known once more of it becomes the focus and attention of
scholars of medieval music.69
The impact of virtuosic recordings of Hildegard’s music on our perception of
her as a composer cannot be overstated. Without the recordings would everyone

65
  Sequentia, Ordo virtutum (audio recording), Deutsche Harmonia Mundi 77051–2–RG,
1982; Symphoniae (audio recording), Deutsche Harmonia Mundi 77020–2–RG, 1985; Canticles
of Ecstasy (see note 27); Voice of the Blood (audio recording), Deutsche Harmonia Mundi 05472
77346 2, 1995; O Jerusalem (audio recording), Deutsche Harmonia Mundi 05472 77353 2,
1997; and Saints (audio recording), Deutsche Harmonia Mundi 05472 77378 2, 1998.
66
  Since 1984, for example, Sequentia has given a two-week summer workshop
annually at the University of British Columbia, Canada.
67
  Voices of Ascension, From Chant to Renaissance (audio recording), Delos DE
3174, 1995.
68
  Tapestry, Sapphire Night (see note 26).
69
 An initial exploration of late chant style contextualizing Hildegard and Hermannus
but looking at office repertory from the centuries beyond can be found in Jennifer Bain,
‘Hildegard, Hermannus and Late Chant Style’, Journal of Music Theory 52/1 (forthcoming).
See also Barbara Stühlmeyer’s comparison of Hildegard’s musical style with other twelfth-
century office repertoire in Die Gesänge der Hildegard von Bingen: Eine musikologische,
theologische und kulturhistorische Untersuchung (Hildesheim; Zürich; New York: Georg
Olms Verlag, 2003), 191–291.

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– church choirs, university chorales, early music ensembles – put Hildegard on
their programmes? Without the recordings would the New Age recording industry
have appropriated Hildegard so enthusiastically? Without the recordings would
Bruce Holsinger have given Hildegard’s texts and music a homoerotic spin?70
Given the similarities in musical style, would virtuosic and rhythmic recordings
of Hermannus, sung in high registers with female voices, produce the same
result? Probably not. I suspect that Hermannus would be treated more seriously
as a composer than Hildegard has, if less sensationally as a historical figure.
The difference lies in Hildegard and her ‘legend’ as an ‘ecstatic’ visionary, quite
unlike Hermannus’s less compelling life story as a lame monk with an interest in
mathematics. Hildegard’s status as an ecstatic is the ‘hook’ that has been used to
promote her music, but often it has obscured the music’s historical context.

70
  Bruce W. Holsinger, ‘Sine Tactu Viri: The Musical Somatics of Hildegard of
Bingen’, in Music, Body and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 87–136.

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