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The Vision of Music in Saint Hildegard’s Scivias: Synthesizing Image, Text, Notation, and Theory
Publication Date : 31 January 2013
$34.50
: 
Description
This essay, published in print and as a web app, presents images, song texts, and music from the final vision in St. Hildegard of Bingen’s prophetic work, Scivias (c1151).
The manuscript for this “Vision of Music” provides lyrics and images for a celebration of music’s power. Claire Fontijn’s essay combines these materials with music notation and audio from her famous proto-“opera,” Ordo Virtutum, for which the Scivias vision seems to be a prototype.
The publication contains:
- 6 contemporary images with detailed explanations
- parallel texts in Latin and English for each of the songs
- audio playlists with samples of each song, with buy links to full versions on iTunes
- complete dialogue in English for a morality play in the manuscript
- fully-reconstructed performing edition, in Latin and English, of the Scivias musical drama
- scholarly commentary with interactive reference notes.
The essay:
- explains Hildegard’s images of her visions with captions and extracts from her own writings that describe the characters and events they depict
- presents the seven groups among the “ranks of heaven” to which each pair of songs is inscribed
- describes their place in the cosmos with reference to Hildegard’s ten-stringed psaltery (presented in interactive graphics with audio and glossary) on which each note and each musical mode corresponds to a moral virtue and a member of the heavenly host.
Hildegard received her visions with all of her senses; now this app allows us to examine the Vision of Music as she intended with all parts of her musical visions, or “symphonia,” brought together in a unified experience.
The mystic, visionary, philosopher, and composer HILDEGARD OF BINGEN (1098–1179) was nobly born in Bermersheim, Gaul, at the time of the first crusade.
She experienced vision, trances, and illness from an early age. Her first vision occurred before she was five. Three years later she was enclosed as an oblate at the Benedictine monastery of Disibodenberg, named for an Irish monk who came as a missionary to the region in the seventh century.
Hildegard was elected Abbess at the age of 38 in 1136. She composed a cycle of over 70 songs in a “Symphony of the Harmony of Celestial Revelations.” In contrast to the narrow scope of most chants in her day, Hildegard’s music used extremes of the vocal range and employed more wide intervals. She described her visionary experiences over a ten-year period, providing the material for the descriptions and colors of the performers and the stage in Ordo Virtutum, a musical drama about the struggle for a human soul, or Anima, between the Virtues and the Devil.
CLAIRE FONTIJN is Associate Professor of Music at Wellesley College. She has published on flute-playing techniques of the eighteenth century and on creative women of the Baroque period. Her first book, Desperate Measures: The Life and Music of Antonia Padoani Bembo, on a Venetian noblewoman who composed music for Louis XIV in France, published by Oxford University Press in 2006, won ASCAP’s Nicolas Slonimsky Award for Outstanding Musical Biography and honorable mention in the competition for the Pauline Alderman Award for Scholarship on Women in Music, in 2007. Her Fiori Musicali (edited with Susan Parisi) was a Finalist for the Ruth Solie Award for a Collection of Essays from the American Musicological Society.