Hildegard on Trial: A Note Regarding the Narrow Reception of a Medieval Abbess-Composer

Hildegard of Bingen, known widely after her death as the ‘Sybil of the Rhine’, was an abbess, composer, poet, herbalist, artist, scholar, mystic and visionary. During her lifetime (1098-1179), Hildegard produced major works of music, drama, and art alongside works of theology, literature, science and natural history. Known from Byzantium to England, Hildegard was of such stature in her own time that she was often called upon to advise all levels of ecclesiastical and secular authorities. Her letters to bishops, popes and kings demonstrate that Hildegard was deeply involved in affairs of church and state. Hildegard was also a first in many respects—she was the first to found a freestanding, all-women’s abbey, the first to identify the medicinal properties of certain plants and natural objects, and she remains the first musical composer whose biography is well preserved. By all standards, Hildegard was a remarkable person. But, like many women who lived in the Middle Ages, Hildegard was all but forgotten until rather recently, when academia became more interested in and open to women’s issues. Since her rediscovery, scholars in many fields have struggled to evaluate Hildegard’s place in history.¹

Though Hildegard owes her current popularity to a surge of attention brought about by feminist interest, one might argue that situating Hildegard as a ‘Medieval woman’ (alongside figures such as Eleanor of Aquitaine, Christine de Pizan, Margery Kempe and Alice Chaucer) has been as much an impediment as it has been a help in evaluating her place in history. As a ‘Medieval woman’ (a genre that brings its own archetypes to bear on its subjects), the uniqueness of Hildegard’s life and the unusual features of her music have all too easily been attributed to a hyper-sexualized understanding of her gender and an exaggerated understanding of the influence of her gender over her life and work. There can be no question that Hildegard was an extraordinary woman worthy of her place among other famous ‘Medieval women’, but this is not the only way of understanding her life and works. This note wishes to suggest that Hildegard’s importance to history—and to music history, in particular—need not necessarily be cast in sexualized or gendered terms and that we may do better to approach Hildegard anew.

Though the most widely read surveys of Medieval music continue to leave Hildegard out entirely (a problem in itself), Hildegard is, now, included in most general histories of Western music, especially those that have been recently published or updated.² But rather than focus on Hildegard’s sizeable contributions to music history, these texts tend to focus more on Hildegard’s gender, framing her musical accomplishments in gendered terms as exceptional for a ‘Medieval woman’. For example, the latest edition of Craig Wright's and Bryan Simms's Music in Western Civilization begins its discussion by quipping that Hildegard’s story demonstrates how ‘a woman might rise above her traditionally subordinate position’ and suggests that her chants, like her life, ‘do not conform to the accepted norms of the time’.³ Noting that her sequences ‘do not strictly follow’ conventional form and characterizing her antiphons as sometimes ‘wildly melismatic’, the Wright and Simms narrative suggests that Hildegard’s music is different because she ‘seems to have had little concern for the norms of Gregorian chant’.⁴ This attitude, they imply, derives from Hildegard’s general refusal to play by any of the traditional rules of her time, especially the rules of gender. Other music history texts, such as Burkholder's A History of Western Music and Kerman’s and Tomlinson’s Listen similarly frame the ‘great individuality’ of Hildegard’s music as a function of her gender transgression or as an extraordinary accomplishment for a woman in her time.⁵

In some studies, Hildegard’s reputation as a rule-breaking woman-warrior takes on explicitly sexualized terms, especially in Bruce Holsinger’s award-winning, if somewhat controversial book, Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture.⁶ There, Holsinger describes music as an ‘often erotic medium’ for Hildegard. Asserting that Hildegard’s songs put forward a strong sense of sexual desire (a conclusion derived from his analysis of her song texts), Holsinger suggests that sexual desire and, in some cases, homosexual desire was at the centre (or was the centre) of Hildegard’s musical aesthetic. He writes:

The various forms of desire registered in the Symphonia pervaded Hildegard’s entire musical world, in which a group of nuns, living in intimate proximity, raise their voices together in song, allowing music—the actual cantus resonating between the nuns’ bodies as well as the Symphonia emerging from the womb and flesh of the Virgin and Ecclesia—to create and enliven, the social, institutional, and devotional bonds both between one another and between themselves and the Virgin they worshipped.⁷

This interpretation is certainly possible, but do we really believe that Hildegard’s music was such a sexual activity? Moreover, is it not odd that Hildegard would express sexual desire in a way that resonates so easily with notions of eroticism from the present day—notions which otherwise have been thought to have been unknown in the Middle Ages?⁸ Is this interpretation really grounded in Hildegard’s life and work or does it derive from our own desires to understand her life and work a certain way?

Of course, this way of reading Hildegard is not unique to musicology, which draws its cues from other disciplines. Historians such as Norman Cantor have gone so far as to purport that Hildegard was a part of a ‘medieval women’s liberation movement’ and that her life and works constitute ‘a form of women’s revolt against the male-dominated society’.⁹ Cantor and, indeed, many others have seen Hildegard as ‘confined and frustrated, in both a disciplinary and sexual sense’, a figure who put her life to the purpose of enacting a kind ‘feminist doctrine’.¹⁰ Few have cast Hildegard otherwise within the field of musicology, save Richard Taruskin’s treatment of Hildegard in his recently published Oxford History of Western Music.¹¹ Though Taruskin dispenses with the sexualization of Hildegard’s music, he, like others, paints Hildegard as unruly, remarking that her compositional techniques were ‘unheard of’ and that her melodies were difficult ‘to comprehend rationally’.¹² Here, the discussion is gender-neutral, but the portrayal of Hildegard as a rule-breaker bears a striking resemblance to (and is, perhaps, derivative of) gendered discussions such as those cited above.

The narrow focus on Hildegard’s gender has caused us to lose sight of the fact that her music questions some of our most central assumptions about the music of the Middle Ages. Her Ordo virtutum is the earliest surviving morality play (with music) by more than 100 years. Stylistically, her music stands apart because of its extraordinary ambitus (up to two and a half octaves), unusual use of modality, and uncommon expressiveness manifested in the form of melodic flourishes, or melismas. In addition, Hildegard is the first composer known to have collected her own musical works in a single-authored manuscript, a collection she named the Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum. Collecting and, in a sense, ‘publishing’ her own work was an act of musical authorship not to be repeated for almost 200 years when Guillaume de Machaut (ca. 1300-1377) collected his own works.

Yes, Hildegard’s musical accomplishments were remarkable ‘for a medieval woman’, but they would have been just remarkable for any 12th-century composer, regardless of gender. Simply put, Hildegard’s music stands to change many long-held views about musical style, musical aesthetics, and our understanding of composition, authorship, and musical expression in the Middle Ages—if only we would turn our attention to the music.

The problems with viewing Hildegard’s accomplishments as the product of a feminist purpose, a rule-breaking agenda, or a sexual activity are (or ought to be) self-evident, for there is little evidence beyond nuanced readings of her biography to lend credence to these interpretations. Moreover, directly connecting Hildegard’s musical style to these assumptions about her gender, sex, or sexuality—that is, to understand her style as a deliberate attempt to subvert the norms of her day—belies the fact that the irregularities in her music could just as easily be explained by suggesting that Hildegard was unschooled in the musical norms of her time or that her music may be representative of local traditions, now lost. Hildegard’s own explanation—‘untaught by anyone, I composed and chanted plainsong in praise of God and the saints, although I had never studied either musical notation or any kind of singing’—suggests that it was her praise of God that motivated her most.¹³ A deep-seated sexual or gender frustration may have been involved in making Hildegard’s music different (she may have disregarded the rules, or had contempt for them), but her own explanation suggests that she did not know the rules and this seems to have had little to do with her gender. Though Hildegard’s sentiment comes to us through a source that cannot be taken at face value—a Vita—its seems to me that all other readings of the abbess’s life and works (including those of the Vita) have been cast aside in order to put forward a single, narrow way of understanding her life and work.

Discussions of Hildegard’s sexuality and gender are valid and important. There is more to learn about the ways that Hildegard pushed gender boundaries, not least because such study could teach us more about how gender roles were constructed during Hildegard’s time. But we have allowed discussions of Hildegard’s gender to become the whole story and, in a sense, we have allowed Hildegard’s story to become more about our desire to see wildness, irrationality, transgression, and subversiveness in a ‘Medieval woman’ than about Hildegard, her life, or her work. Portraying Hildegard’s antiphons as wild or her sequences unruly is a way of realizing our conception of her biography in her music itself. But this realization is about us, not about Hildegard. In the end, hearing Hildegard’s music narrowly as an expression of the sexual and gender frustrations we have actually obscures our ability to evaluate Hildegard’s role in history even further.

As Paul Griffiths recently remarked, Hildegard has exploded so far outside of her context that her true importance has become harder to discern now more than ever before.¹⁴ We know that Hildegard’s music is not like Gregorian chant, but we do not know what her music does represent—if anything at all—because we have been unwilling to give Hildegard’s musical aesthetic any serious consideration beyond calling it eccentric or seeing it as an expression of her gender turmoil. In short, we have become unable take up Hildegard on her own terms (that is, in her own context) because her newfound place in the scholarly canon serves our purposes best if she remains as an example of a social transgressor. This has trumped all other views. Although it has been useful to consider the subversiveness of Hildegard’s gender and sexuality vis-à-vis her role as composer (endeavours which both brought her into the canon and made her and her work a proper subject of academic research), now that Hildegard is an established figure, it is important to evaluate her musical accomplishments from other points of view as well. Emancipating Hildegard from her narrow framing will not only help us learn more about her life and works, it will free us to evaluate the broader impact of an extraordinary Medieval person on the history of music—and beyond.

Daniel DiCenso, U. of Cambridge

NOTES

1. Recommended full-length studies (with biography and bibliography) include: Saint Hildegard of Bingen, Symphonia: A Criticial Edition of the Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum [Symphony of the Harmony of Celestial Revelations], Barbara Newman, ed., 2nd Edition (New York: Cornell University Press, 1998); Barbara Newman, ed., Voice of the Living Light: Hildegard of Bingen and her World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998); and Bruce W. Holsinger, Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001).

2.The two most widely read surveys of medieval music, Richard Hoppin’s Medieval Music and Jeremy Yudkin’s Music in Medieval Europe, have not been updated since the rediscovery of Hildegard and therefore continue to be published, today, with Hildegard completely missing (Hoppin) or largely missing (Yudkin) from the story. Richard H. Hoppin, Medieval Music (New York: Norton, 1978), and Jeremy Yudkin, Music in Medieval Europe (Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 1989).

3.Craig Wright and Bryan Simms, Music in Western Civilization (Belmont, CA: Thomson Schirmer, 2006), pp. 38-9.

4.Ibid., p. 39.

5.J. Peter Burkholder, Donald Jay Grout, and Claude V. Palisca, A History of Western Music, 7th Edition (New York: Norton, 2006) [quote p. 69] and Joseph Kerman and Gary Tomlinson with Vivian Kerman, Listen (Boston: Bedford-St. Martin’s, 2004).

6.Holsinger, Music, Body, and Desire.

7.Ibid., p.124.

8.See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978).

9.Norman F. Cantor, The Civilization of the Middle Ages (New York: HarperPerennial, 1993), pp. 355-6.

10.Ibid., p. 356.

11.Richard Taruskin, Oxford History of Western Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

12.Ibid., p. 91.

13.Vita S. Hildegardis in J.-P. Migne, ed., Patrologia Latina cursus completus: series Latina 197: 104a (Paris, 1855). ‘…cantum cum melodia in laudem Dei et sanctorum absque doctrina ullius hominis protuli et cantavi, cum nunquam vel neumam, vel cantum aliquem didicissem’. Translation: Symphonia, p. 17.

14.Paul Griffiths, A Concise History of Western Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), p. 22.