The Hottest 900-Year-Old on the Charts

What do you do for an icon on her 900th birthday? You interpret her--and then, to liven things up, you argue about it.

This year is the big 9-0-0 for Hildegard von Bingen, the 12th century abbess who has become a ‘90s cult figure. She is undoubtedly our only celebrity composer with a short-form bio that also reads “mystic, theologian, naturalist, herbalist, poet and advisor to emperors.”

When we think of Hildegard as primarily a composer, says the medievalist Christopher Page, we are “mistaking the tail for the comet.” She and her contemporaries probably considered her music the least of her achievements, compared to, say, corresponding with popes; founding a convent; and writing books about medicine, natural history, the lives of saints, and her own visions and prophecies.

But beleaguered record companies hope we’ll continue to aim our telescopes wrong. Since Page’s album “A Feather on the Breath of God” kicked off the Hildecraze in 1982, the music of Hildegard has sold over a million recordings. No other medieval composer (or female composer of any era) has even come close.

Several dozen recordings are out, featuring everything from solo voice to Tibetan “singing bowls” to electric guitar and drums. Medieval-music specialists such as the vocal ensembles Sequentia and Anonymous 4 compete with the Hildegard-to-a-disco-beat CD that came out a couple of years ago, and the New Age-y Hildegard arrangements of Richard Souther on his CD “Vision.”

Musicians aren’t the only ones interpreting Hildegard, of course. A film about Hildegard is in the works, a pair of novels is out, and dozens of Web sites honor her. In Michigan this summer you could have gone to a Hildegard “sacred healing” weekend, and in Germany you can still go to a Hildespa to receive treatments based on her medical writings.

Meanwhile, the mystically inclined of all persuasions study her books of visions. Academics, whether feminist or medievalist or both, debate such questions as how independent the abbess was, how Machiavellian, how sexual and so forth. Even neurologists have gotten into the act, arguing that Hildegard’s visions were the result of migraines.

But the musicians, her main modern celebrants, find at least as much to argue about as the scholars. How should this music, the first certifiably composed by a woman, be performed and understood?

What becomes a 900-year-old legend best?

One set of answers comes from the people who originally put Hildegard on the charts, the early-music movement. These musicians are to varying degrees interested in re-creating the performance style used in the composer’s own era. But when you ask them what that style involves, they differ. Often, they differ with their own younger selves.

Christopher Page and his group Gothic Voices scored their first commercial success 16 years ago with “A Feather on the Breath of God,” and when it was reissued on CD last year it scaled the classical charts again. But Page doesn’t seem to like the disc very much.

In his post-”Feather” period, Page (whose day job is as a philologist at Cambridge University) has revised his views on medieval performance. Based on his analysis of period evidence, Page would now do Hildegard without even the drone instruments that sound so appealing on “Feather.” “It seems highly unlikely,” he comments, “that any kind of instrumental playing was involved.” He now favors using just one female voice, unadorned, singing quietly.

“There’s no real reason to think that any of Hildegard’s songs were ever performed at all,” Page says. “Hildegard writes these pieces as acts of prayer in themselves, and exactly what use they were put to, if any use at all, is something that we don’t really know. It’s possible to imagine Hildegard or somebody else humming them or singing them softly in the context of private prayer, for example.”

His early-music colleagues are by no means all convinced that they should reject instrumentation for Hildegard’s songs, but some of them seem to agree. Anonymous 4 uses no instruments. Sequentia uses fewer than they once did.

You can hear the change if you compare Sequentia’s latest version of Hildegard’s sacred drama “Ordo Virtutum” (The Order of the Virtues) to its pioneering 1982 recording of the piece. In the earlier version, instruments accompany the singers almost throughout the four-act work; in the new one--which can be heard on CD and which Sequentia will be performing in a staged version Nov. 22 and 23 at Mount St. Mary’s College in Brentwood--they play mostly in interludes between Hildegard’s pieces.

Why did Sequentia curtail the accompaniment? The ensemble’s co-leader, Barbara Thornton, says, “To be absolutely frank, I don’t think in 1982 any of us had the wherewithal to sing modally that long”--a reference to the fact that medieval music is built not on the familiar chords and scales of recent music, but in complex “modes” that are difficult to master.

In the early ‘80s, Sequentia’s instrumentalists got the modal style more quickly, and that helped the singers. Today, Thornton says, the singers can sing modally without difficulty: “We really can, and it’s an achievement.”

Of course, some early-music practitioners do use instrumental accompaniment more freely. Thornton makes stirring use of church bells, in “O Jerusalem” on the CD of that title, and drones on some other Sequentia Hildegard tracks. Stevie Wishart, a medieval-instruments expert and the leader of the group Sinfonye, takes her hurdy-gurdy quite a bit further in a couple of the tracks on her Hildegard CD, “Symphony of the Harmony of Celestial Revelations” on Celestial Harmonies.

And how about Page’s belief that Hildegard’s music was not really performed at all? In general, his colleagues don’t buy it.

Susan Hellauer, a member of Anonymous 4 who has a degree in musicology, does admit that Hildegard’s works are much harder to sing than typical plain chant, and that this “makes one curious as to who it was among the lovely ladies of the convent that actually could get this stuff out dependably.” But she points out that Hildegard’s pieces praising saints exactly fit into the appropriate slots in the liturgy. “If you’re just going to write what inspires you,” she asks, “why write the nine little antiphons that are needed for [a] particular feast?” The booklet notes to Sequentia’s new “Ordo” suggest that the work--which some regard as the first surviving opera--was premiered at the inauguration of Hildegard’s convent in 1152.

There are plenty of other arguments. For example, there is no consensus about what rhythms are implied by the notation of Hildegard’s era.

But if early-music performers can’t quite agree on how it was done back in Hildegard’s time, they also don’t agree about whether their goal is to re-create her performance practices exactly. Thornton, for instance, denies that her production of “Ordo” is an attempt to re-create what a performance in Hildegard’s time might have been like.

“Of course,” she says, “that’s an image that’s always in front of one’s eyes. But I cannot imagine that there are too many early-music people who, with time, would subscribe to [complete] authenticity as their goal.

“I am trying just as hard as I can to reach my artistic goals, even if I’m not 100% authentic.”

Thornton may not be 100% authentic, but she can’t help but be orders of magnitude closer to Hildegard’s style than the electronic “Ordo Virtutum” recently performed at the Lincoln Center Festival by four composers calling themselves the Hildegurls. Eve Beglarian, Kitty Brazelton, Elaine Kaplinsky and Lisa Bielawa aren’t even remotely trying to sound medieval.

Instead, each took one act of the play and wrote her own electro-acoustic music to go with Hildegard’s chants. They performed the piece by themselves, with each one playing the main character--the Soul--in her own act. The four women took different musical approaches, incorporating such things as complex drones, polyphony built over (or out of) Hildegard’s single lines, synthesized backgrounds, and improvisations with keyboard and electric bass. In general, they left Hildegard’s text and melodies intact, translating only one role into English (and German): the Devil.

That’s because the Devil is the only character in “Ordo” for whom Hildegard wrote no music. “The idea seems to be that singing reflects harmony and harmony reflects the glory of God,” Beglarian explains, “therefore the Devil doesn’t sing.”

The Hildegurls weave musical commentary around the Devil’s lines. When he appears (played by a Gurl) during the Brazelton section of the evening, he is accompanied by synthesized sound based on a tape of a door that someone slammed while Brazelton was trying to work. When he appears during the Beglarian section, he is accompanied by synthesized rattlesnake rattles (a reference to the soul being poisoned by the Devil), and a breathy, subtly sexual sound. (Not everything about their production could be called subtle. At one point in her act, Beglarian, playing the Soul on a visit to Hell, has her clothes torn off by diabolical fiends, and keeps singing, naked.)

In fact, Hildegard’s “Ordo”--a sort of morality play in which the Soul abandons the ministrations of the Virtues for the blandishments of the Devil, and eventually finds its way back to the Virtues for salvation--may seem at odds with postmodern New York sensibilities.

Bielawa pointed out to the New York Times, “We don’t share some of her crazy theological ideas.” But Beglarian finds the play surprisingly relevant: “The sense of losing your way and needing to find your way back--that sense of recovery, to use pop psychology talk--is made completely manifest [in “Ordo”].

“To me,” she adds, “there is something very powerful and emotional about that connecting up over nine centuries.”

The Hildegurls aren’t the first women composers to use Hildegard as a creative springboard. Australian Becky Llewellyn, to name just one, drew on Hildegard for her composition “O Wonder!” It was completed in 1990 and performed in Tucson and Lake Placid, N.Y., in 1996. There has even been at least one male composer, Robert Kyr, who set some Hildegard texts to his own music.

Such composers could point out that the practice of using compositions from the past as the basis for modern pieces goes back a long way. Liszt did it, Bach did it, and even Hildegard may have based a melody or two on Gregorian chants. By comparison, the early-music approach, with its interest in historical performance, is a latecomer.

Of course, composers aren’t the only ones recycling Hildegard. As Kitty Brazelton of the Hildegurls says, “Hildegard’s music has lent itself to some pretty nefarious enterprises of late, with the whole New Age fad--her music is so drone friendly. I’ve heard some cheesy synth versions of some of her music.”

Brazelton’s complaints give her common ground with the early-music performers, who tend to revile New Age Hildegard. One wonders what she’d make of the new “Lux Vivens” CD, on which the sweet-voiced Jocelyn Montgomery is accompanied by the synthesizer backgrounds of filmmaker David Lynch. The project’s agenda is quite different from, say, Page’s. In a sketch for the liner notes included in the press packet, the singer writes: “Fire, rain; thundering hooves, birds, and de-tuned strings. Recorders and electric guitar spin voices off in all directions. . . . A timeless, universal, healing journey. An apotheosis of sound. Pure as the five earthly elements [Hildegard] was inspired by.”

Of course, some might argue that a spiritually intense New Age performer is closer to what Hildegard is really about than an early-music historian. But it would be a mistake to describe the early-music motivation as merely scholarship. “From Hildegard,” Barbara Thornton has said, “I’ve learned a lot about women’s musicality, women’s relationship to their own spirituality. . . . Feminine spirituality is something very natural, uncomplicated and yet intense, in my experience.”

Of course, the critics can’t agree about the different approaches to Hildegard either. The New York Times praised Sequentia’s singing in its presentation of “Ordo” at Lincoln Center, but found its staging “stiff,” on par with “a high school pageant.” On the other hand, it found the Hildegurls staging “fluid and direct,” but wished that the Gurls would take even more liberties with the music.

By contrast, the Wall Street Journal thought the Sequentia production “made her message impossible to ignore,” while the Gurls’ production reduced “Ordo” to a “naive and modest message: girls together can do anything.” So much for the critics.

As for the performers, you’d think they’d at least agree that Hildegard was a flawless genius. For the most part, they do, but Page is, again, the iconoclast.

“Every Hildegard LP or CD I’ve ever heard, including my own, sounds very, very similar. She’s powerfully voiced but not a flexible or versatile artist. And her mode of enhanced ecstasy can become wearing, even sometimes unconvincing after a while, as if you wonder whether she really feels as much as her language is laying claim to. So maybe Hildegard should now be put on ice for 50 years and we’ll have another go.”

Fat chance. Page seems to be the only one who is even slightly bored. Hildegurl Kitty Brazelton’s first encounter with Hildegard came during a stint teaching music appreciation as a grad student; her immediate thought was, “Is this just some token woman? But when I began to perform it--wow!”

Sequentia’s Thornton has performed more of Hildegard than anyone--she is one CD shy of becoming the first to record the complete oeuvre. “I have never, ever had the feeling that I’m doing the same thing [over and over] with Hildegard,” Thornton says. “She is beyond belief a major genius for me.”

As a medieval specialist, Thornton is particularly attuned to the way Hildegard ignored the conventions of her time: “Sometimes she does things that I absolutely cannot believe she even wants to. I think, ‘She’ll never pull this off,’ and by the end of the session, I’m blown away. It’s very fluid, artistic, wonderful material.”

The variety of performers and attacks may prove Thornton’s fluidity point. And as for “wonderful,” even Page has just recorded two more Hildegard pieces (in the instrument-free style he now prefers) as part of a forthcoming Hyperion CD.

“She was,” he says, “a remarkable woman in an age of remarkable men.”

How many of her sisters, after all, have touched off 900th birthday festivals around the world? And how many have modern interpreters at all--much less competing ones of every stripe?