Abstract
Abbess Hildegard von Bingen (1098–1179) became an unexpected cult figure in the 1980s with the release of A Feather on the Breath of God, a full album of her devotional chants, performed by Gothic Voices (dir. Christopher Page). As Jennifer Bain has argued, the composer’s reception in the world of contemporary classical music rested on cultural understandings of Hildegard as a visionary nun, a woman whose spirituality had almost magical qualities; Hildegard’s gender, and her relative isolation as a well-documented female composer of devotional song in the twelfth century, led to her association with “ecstasy” – in melodic style, in the meanings found in her music, and with the interpretation of her works in performance. This paper will examine the ways in which notions of female ecstasy also informed the use of Hildegard’s music in three examples of ambient house, and will consider the relationship between the imagined female “voice” of the medieval past and the stereotypical presence of female vocality in electronic genres.
The ubiquitous medievalism threaded through diverse pop genres of the late 1980s and early 1990s – including metal, EDM, and New Age – further drove Hildegard’s adoption by musicians working in dance and ambient genres. Unlike the masculine monastic chanting found in the music of New Age group Enigma, for example, samples of Hildegard’s music foregrounded the solo female voice in ways common to electronic genres more widely. This paper seeks to understand the relationship between the medievalism inherent in appropriating the music of the distant past and understandings of the relationship between chant and ambient music in both historical and more recent contexts. What can the use of Hildegard’s song in tracks as disparate as The Beloved’s “The Sun Rising” (1989), Orbital’s “Belfast” (1991), and Richard Souther’s “Red River Falling: O rubor sanguinis” (1996) tell us about ambient music’s relationship with classical music of the past? And, perhaps more controversially, what do such interrelationships (or “collaborations”, to quote Souther) reveal about problematic historical stereotypes of female creativity?
Biography
Dr Lisa Colton is Reader in Musicology at the University of Huddersfield. Her monograph, Angel Song: Medieval English Music in History, was published by Routledge, and has been described as “a masterful account of the medieval history of English music” (Music and Letters, 2017). Lisa’s recent research has focused on analytical approaches to fourteenth-century English motets (Early Music), on medievalism in the music of British composer Margaret Lucy Wilkins, on aspects of cultural identity in Beyoncé’s music, and on musical interactions with religious architectural environments. With Dr Catherine Haworth, Lisa has co-edited the volume of essays Gender, Age and Musical Creativity (Routledge, 2015); a second volume of essays, entitled Sources of Identity: Makers, Owners and Users of Music Sources Before 1600 was co-edited with Tim Shephard (Brepols, 2017).
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