Hildegard Von Bingen S Ordo Virtutum

The Ordo Virtutum, Hildegard von Bingen’s twelfth-century music-drama, is one of the first known examples of a large-scale composition by a named composer in the Western canon. Not only does the Ordo’s expansive duration set it apart from its precursors, but also its complex imagery and non-biblical narrative have raised various questions concerning its context and genre. As a poetic meditation on the fall of a soul, the Ordo deploys an array of personified virtues and musical forces over the course of its eighty-seven chants. In this ambitious analysis of the work, Michael C. Gardiner examines how classical Neoplatonic hierarchies are established in the music-drama and considers how they are mediated and subverted through a series of concentric absorptions (absorptions related to medieval Platonism and its various theological developments) which lie at the core of the work’s musical design and text. This is achieved primarily through Gardiner’s musical network model, which implicates mode into a networked system of nodes, and draws upon parallels with the medieval interpretation of Platonic ontology and Hildegard’s correlative realization through sound, song, and voice.

For this revised edition of Hildegard's liturgical song cycle, Barbara Newman has redone her prose translations of the songs, updated the bibliography and discography, and made other minor changes. Also included is an essay by Marianne Richert Pfau which delineates the connection between music and text in the Symphonia. Famous throughout Europe during her lifetime, Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179) was a composer and a poet, a writer on theological, scientific, and medical subjects, an abbess, and a visionary prophet. One of the very few female composers of the Middle Ages whose work has survived, Hildegard was neglected for centuries until her liturgical song cycle was rediscovered. Songs from it are now being performed regularly by early music groups, and more than twenty compact discs have been recorded.

Hildegard of Bingen (1098 - 1179) was the outstanding female religious figure of twelfth-century Germany. A Benedictine nun, she was consulted by bishops, popes, and kings, and wrote copiously for her fellow monastics: mystical and visionary material, liturgical music, biblical commentaries, saints' lives, and theological explanations of various aspects of church doctrine, as well as treatises on natural science and the healing arts. Her story is important to all students of spirituality, medieval history, and culture.

Completed in 1173, The Book of Divine Works (Liber Divinorum Operum) is the culmination of the Visionary’s Doctor’s theological project, offered here for the first time in a complete and scholarly English translation. The first part explores the intricate physical and spiritual relationships between the cosmos and the human person, with the famous image of the universal Man standing astride the cosmic spheres. The second part examines the rewards for virtue and the punishments for vice, mapped onto a geography of purgatory, hellmouth, and the road to the heavenly city. At the end of each Hildegard writes extensive commentaries on the Prologue to John’s Gospel (Part 1) and the first chapter of Genesis (Part 2)—the only premodern woman to have done so. Finally, the third part tells the history of salvation, imagined as the City of God standing next to the mountain of God’s foreknowledge, with Divine Love reigning over all.

Michael C. Gardiner examines how classical Neoplatonic hierarchies are established in the Ordo Virtutum, Hildegard von Bingen's twelfth-century music-drama, and considers how these hierarchies are mediated and subverted through a series of concentric absorptions which lie at the core of the work's musical design and text.

Fresh and innovative takes on the dissemination of music in manuscript, print, and, now, electronic formats, revealing how the world has experienced music from the sixteenth century to the present. This collection of essays examines the diverse ways in which music and ideas about music have been disseminated in print and other media from the sixteenth century onward. Contributors look afresh at unfamiliar facets of the sixteenth-century book trade and the circulation of manuscript and printed music in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries. They also analyze and critique new media forms, showing how a dizzying array of changing technologies has influenced what we hear, whom we hear, and how we hear. The repertoires considered include Western art music -- from medieval to contemporary -- as well as popular music and jazz. Assembling contributions from experts in a wide range of fields, such as musicology, music theory, music history, and jazz and popular music studies, Music in Print and Beyond: Hildegard von Bingen to The Beatles sets new standards for the discussion of music's place in Western cultural life. Contributors: Joseph Auner, Bonnie J. Blackburn, Gabriela Cruz, Bonnie Gordon, Ellen T. Harris, Lewis Lockwood, Paul S. Machlin, Roberta Montemorra Marvin, Honey Meconi, Craig A. Monson, Kate van Orden, Sousan L. Youens. Roberta Montemorra Marvin teaches at the University of Iowa and is the author of Verdi the Student -- Verdi the Teacher (Istituto Nazionale di Studi Verdiani, 2010) and editor of The Cambridge Verdi Encyclopedia (Cambridge University Press, 2013). Craig A. Monson is Professor of Musicology at Washington University (St Louis, Missouri) and is the author of Divas in the Convent: Nuns, Music, and Defiance in Seventeenth-Century Italy (University of Chicago Press, 2012).

Drawing on contemporary sources, the text unfolds Hildegard's life from the time of her entrance into an anchoress's cell--where a woman would remain in pious isolation--to her death as a famed visionary and writer, abbess and confidante of popes and kings, more than seventy years later. Against this background the author explores Hildegard's vast creative work, encompassing theology, medicine, natural history, poetry, and music.

This volume explores the extraordinary life and works of Hildegard of Bingen, medieval writer, composer, visionary, and monastic founder.