Hildegard of Bingen

"Yes, they have. For the general public—and I include myself in this—Hildegard came into our lives about 40 years ago with a recording called “A Feather on the Breath of God”, which is a line of Hildegard’s, by Gothic Voices. Musicologists had known about Hildegard a lot longer than that and there’s plenty of scholarly writing about her going back to the 19th century, which Fiona Maddocks brings out in her book. Hildegard was an extraordinary figure. She was an abbess who ran an abbey in the Rhineland in the 11th- 12th century. She was an administrator, but also a scientist, a medic, a philosopher, a theologian and quite an interesting writer. She wrote poetry, she wrote plays, and she wrote what is almost the first opera, although she wouldn’t have known that that’s what it was—a kind of sung play. Hildegard composed these songs, hymns and sequences that were really strikingly original, mostly for the fluidity of the melodic writing. There was only melodic writing—that’s all you get with Hildegard. But at the time, it was thought by the Church that a melodic line should span maybe a fourth or a fifth, so half an octave. Some of Hildegard’s go across two octaves. They have an enormous range and floridity. In a way, you could say that it is pictorial because she is not only composing her music to the glory of her God but also drawing very heavily on the imagery of the natural world. One of the things that she became very interested in depicting is what she called viriditas or greenness. She meant it in the same way that we would think of that word perhaps today, in modern political terms: she was talking about the importance of the natural world and preserving it and its use in healing. But it’s also a symbol for her faith. For instance, the title of one of the songs is “O Viridissima Virga” or “The Greenest Branch.” ‘Virga’ is obviously the same stem that gives us virgin and so it’s also about the Virgin Mary. So it’s this confluence of the natural world, and her study of the natural world, with her faith. All of that is represented in the music. You sense the melodic line twisting around itself like the tendrils of a plant. That’s also the Tree of Jesse, so everything is intertwined. In the book, Fiona Maddocks does a fantastic job of bringing together everything about Hildegard that had gone before. She’s read very widely. She illuminates the world of Hildegard and the times in which she lived. She was an important figure in terms of the Church and had a long correspondence with Bernard of Clairvaux. She was not un-controversial. Some of her views and her music didn’t sit within the norms of the medieval Church. What I like about this book—and I think this is probably true of all of the books that I’ve chosen—is the way in which it situates the figure that it’s writing about within her world. That happens around about the same time. A monk called Guido of Arezzo came up with not only what we now know as Do Re Mi Fa So La Ti Do, but also staff notation. The modern score, the five lines with the dots that you would find on a concert platform or in a studio with session musicians—that’s Guido. His only had four lines, but he invented it. This allowed Hildegard and anybody else who was interested in composing music to plan it out on the page. Before it wasn’t done that way. You made up a tune in your head and you passed it on orally, or maybe you tried to find some way of notating it. There were earlier forms of notation, but they’re tablature. Guitarists and ukulele players still use tablature, as do a lot of the world’s instruments. The shakuhachi and koto, for instance, in Japan, have forms of tablature. Tablature tells you where to put your fingers, and it might also tell you how hard to pluck a string. It’s a set of instructions which you follow to produce the music, it doesn’t show you the music. Guido’s invention does. You can open it, and if you can read music, you can hear it in your head. None of this is the music, of course. It’s important to recognize that the music is what you hear. It’s not what’s on the page, even though you might be able to hear it in your head. It’s something which is brought to life all the time. Music exists in the present, always, whether it’s in your memory or in the performance that you’re hearing in a concert hall or in the recording you’re listening to. It’s always happening now."