For the Love of Hildegard with Sian Ricketts
Sian Ricketts (voice, recorders, douçaines) enjoys a multi-faceted career as a singer and period woodwinds specialist. She performs medieval, Renaissance, and baroque chamber music and orchestral repertoire with ensembles such as Alkemie (NY), Bach Collegium Fort Wayne (IN), Apollo’s Fire (OH), Dallas Bach Society, Piffaro (PA), Forgotten Clefs, and Labyrinth Baroque (NY). In addition to her interest in early music, Sian also regularly performs 21st-century repertoire as both an instrumentalist and singer, and has collaborated with composers such as Jonathan Dawe, Gregory Spears, Elliot Cole, and Mark Nowakowski. Sian was a Visiting Medieval Fellow at Fordham University for 2019-2020, and is co-director of Fordham University's Collegium ensemble with Tracy Cowart. Sian holds a D.M.A. in historical performance practice from Case Western Reserve University with concentrations in voice and baroque oboe. Here she shares when she discovered Hildegard’s music and how she fell in love with the incredible Medieval polymath’s work.
My first exposure to the music of Hildegard von Bingen was twenty years ago, when I participated in Minnesota Public Radio’s Music Listening competition as a freshman in high school. I remember my visceral response to the excerpt chosen for study in the competition – one where the exalted singing of the Virtues is juxtaposed with the unmelodious yelling of the Devil, who does not have the ability to sing, but can only speak. I had spent years singing in choirs and practicing oboe and piano, but I had never heard anything like it before. My interest in Hildegard and her musical works only grew as I went to obtain a doctorate in historical performance practice and became primarily a performer and teacher of early music.
Hildegard was a polymath who, despite physical and possibly neurological illnesses, lived a long, productive and powerful life by the standards of any century, but particularly so considering she was a twelfth-century nun. Hildegard believed that she received visions from God, which she transcribed, explained, had illustrated, and notated as music – but she also took part in worldly affairs, maintaining correspondences with and offering advice to bishops, popes, kings and queens, and managing and leading a prosperous Benedictine nunnery. In addition to her publicly-circulated works, Hildegard maintained private volumes of science and medicine, and created an entirely new, private language that she used with her fellow nuns in her convent. Her understanding of the human body, the earth and the cosmos was based in commonly-held schema of her time, but also transcended her models, integrating her practical knowledge of herbs, plants, and healing into an all-encompassing worldview that incorporated the concept of “viriditas” (living greenness) as one that connected the human body, the natural world, the cosmos, and spirituality.
As much as I continue to delight in reading Hildegard’s works and the scholarship they have generated, I still find myself equally compelled by her music itself. Hildegard deeply believed in the importance and power of music – she explicitly states in the epilogue to her work Scivias that
…the song of rejoicing softens hard hearts, and draws forth from them the tears of compunction, and invokes the Holy Spirit. And so those voices you hear are like the voice of a multitude, which lifts its sound on high; for jubilant praises, offered in simple harmony and charity, lead the faithful to that consonance in which is no discord, and make those who still live on earth sigh with heart and voice for the heavenly reward. And their song goes through you so that you understand them perfectly; for where divine grace has worked, it banishes all dark obscurity, and makes pure and lucid those things that are obscure to the bodily senses because of the weakness of the flesh. Therefore, let everyone who understands God by faith faithfully offer Him tireless praises, and with joyful devotion sing to Him without ceasing.
Near the end of her life, when she and the nuns of her convent were temporarily banned from music-making, she wrote the following letter to the prelates of Mainz, stating that
Thereby, both through the form and quality of the instruments, as well as through the meaning of the words which accompany them, those who hear might be taught, as we said above, about inward things...The human intellect has great power to resound in living voices, and arouse sluggish souls to vigilance by the song…Holy prophets not only composed psalms and canticles to be sung...but invented musical instruments of diverse kinds with this view, by which the songs could be expressed in multitudinous sounds, so that the listeners, aroused and made adept outwardly, might be nurtured within the forms and the qualities of the instruments, as well as by the meaning of the words performed with them…Therefore, those who, without just cause, impose silence on a church and prohibit the singing of God’s praises and those who have on earth unjustly despoiled God of His honor and glory will lose their place among the chorus of angels, unless they have amended their lives through true penitence and humble restitution.
Hildegard’s belief in the power of music was all-encompassing – for her, life without music was a profound punishment.
As I continued to learn more about music history and become more familiar with early music, I also continued to learn more about Hildegard. As a graduate music student and as a scholar, I became familiar with the multitude of ways in which Hildegard’s music is different from other early medieval monophony – her use of extremely wide musical ranges, predilection for mixed modes, frequent use of large melodic leaps, and explicit text painting are all idiosyncratic hallmarks of her repertoire. Hildegard’s texts, too, are quite different from the sacred texts of her contemporaries – she favors hyperbole, mixed metaphors, startling images, reshaping words into multiple forms (such as the “circled, circling” energy of Wisdom), and personifies the Church and Wisdom as female entities.
As a musician, I have spent much of the past year in the sound-world of Hildegard. I have been providing music for remote church services with my partner, who is an organist – we have performed many of Hildegard’s works as preludes and postludes. This semester I am also teaching a performance practice course focused on the music of Hildegard, and have organized and performed two concert recordings of her works. I have been inspired and elated to discover that Hildegard’s works are not only formally and conceptually distinctive – they are also a pleasure to sing and to play. Although she does have melodic gestures that recur throughout her oeuvre, each of her pieces is thoughtfully constructed, with music that vividly illustrates her texts. Just as she generated new words to express her visions and thoughts, so did she create new melodic shapes to set her texts, as she strove to express the joyful connection she found between humans, our world, and the cosmos.
Just as I could never have imagined the trajectory of my creative and professional life when I first heard Hildegard’s music, I have no idea where the next twenty years will take me – but I am fairly certain it will continue to be full of further discovery and appreciation of Hildegard, her visions (both literal and metaphorical), and her works.