‘The perfect accompaniment to life': why is a 12th-century nun the hottest name in experimental music?

The Guardian

5 days ago

'And behold! In the 43rd year of my earthly course, as I was gazing with great fear and trembling attention at a heavenly vision, I saw a great splendour in which resounded a voice from Heaven saying to me, 'O fragile human, ashes of ashes, and filth of filth! Say and write what you see and hear.'
These are the words of 12th-century polymath Hildegard von Bingen, recalling the divine intervention that set her on the path to becoming one of history's earliest and most influential composers.
Von Bingen has inspired reams of scholarship and writing, films and even perfume, but right now her presence is most keenly felt in music, where her work has transcended the silos of early and classical music to influence experimental and feminist artists. 'I felt an instant connection both earthly and unearthly,' the radical neo-medieval musician Laura Cannell says of Von Bingen's music. 'It was like making a really good friend or falling in love. I can find darkness and light in it; it seems to be the perfect accompaniment to so much of life. My favourite quote from her is: 'Even in a world that's being shipwrecked, remain brave and strong.' This optimism is needed.'
In the last year, Von Bingen has also inspired recordings by alt-popper Julia Holter, ambient experimentalists Larum, Catalan duo Tarta Relena and jazz duo Noah Preminger and Rob Garcia. Go back a few more years and the list expands to include New York vocalist Daisy Press – who combines Hildegard's music with Hindustani ragas and performs it at sites from catacombs to Burning Man – as well as new age harpist Arianna Savall, experimental vocalist Megan Mitchell, Korean American sound artist Bora Yoon, and the doom metal musician Lingua Ignota, who was named after Hildegard's mystical language. The abbess also inspired a 22-minute electric guitar piece by New Zealand underground stalwart Roy Montgomery, while folk-pop singer Devendra Banhart wrote Für Hildegard Von Bingen, which imagined her leaving her abbey behind and working on MTV. Grimes locked herself away like Hildegard for her 2012 album Visions, and in the 1990s even David Lynch produced an album of her music, performed by Jocelyn West (then Jocelyn Montgomery) of Miranda Sex Garden.
But Von Bingen's big break didn't come until almost nine centuries after she was born, with the 1985 recording A Feather on the Breath of God, directed by Christopher Page with soprano Emma Kirkby and Gothic Voices. Not much was expected of the release – 'Lovely music, shame no one will buy it,' the sound engineer apparently said – but it sold in enormous numbers, clocked up accolades including a Gramophone award, and was sampled in club tracks by Orbital and the Beloved. It is still being repressed (most recently in 2024), and after that success, Von Bingen releases began stacking up.
The rediscovery was perhaps inevitable. Although she wasn't included in many musical histories until relatively recently, and was only fully canonised as a saint in 2012, we actually know a lot about Hildegard's life. She was born in 1098 to a wealthy family, then taken into the care of a nun at Disibodenberg monastery in Germany's Rhineland. She had already had visions from age three – neurologist Oliver Sacks suggested they were caused by migraines – but kept them private until appointed an abbess in her 40s. Medieval life expectancy meant these ought to have been her twilight years, but in fact the appointment triggered decades of wildly fruitful output. Her divine visions were transcribed; she wrote works on a raft of subjects; popes, kings and penitents sought her guidance.
Her biographer, Fiona Maddocks, wrote that in order to fully get to grips with Hildegard's output she would have liked to have become specialist in '12th-century Germany, medieval Latin, ecclesiastical history, the history of science and medicine, botany, mineralogy and petrology, zoology and theology, mysticism, music, painting and monastic architecture'. Von Bingen is sometimes named the first composer in music history – although earlier names have since emerged – and is claimed as a feminist hero, radical polymath, ecological pioneer and, in some readings, queer icon, for the way she wrote of her love for her female mentors and peers.
Her output comprises 77 liturgical, or plainsong, chants, known as her Symphonia, as well as a morality play with music that recounts the temptations of the flesh and the journey of a soul. Maddocks writes that her music, with mellifluous melodies ornamenting the texts, 'comes close to sounding like improvisation, developing organically rather than systematically'. It feels freeform in structure, soaring like a hawk in flight, tracing graceful patterns in the air and climbing to the heavens.
Von Bingen's melodies attracted Julia Holter, who drew on her work for the 2024 song Materia. 'Her melodic leaps create a singular harmonic world,' Holter says. 'I'm always trying to write more melismatically – using more notes per syllable – and a lot of her music feels very melismatic.' Cannell, who has made various recordings drawing on Hildegard's work, including an album in 2024, agrees: 'There is so much movement, even if it's not necessarily fast paced music. The melodies lift off straight away.'
Part of the reason Von Bingen resonates with contemporary musicians is that her music predates standardised tunings, so it often has an unfamiliar feel. We also don't know exactly how it should be performed. Things such as pace, harmony or accompaniment are an open question, left to arrangers and performers to decide.
For all her skill, Hildegard wouldn't have thought of herself as a composer – that term is ours – and debate rages in some quarters over whether she wrote her music at all. It's possible the compositions were simply attributed to her as the head of her organisation, like a High Middle Ages version of Damien Hirst. I ask Maddocks about this and she is open minded: 'How do we judge, say, a poem by 'Anon'? Or think of Mozart's Requiem – one of his most popular works, finished by someone else? Does it matter, or can we accept it on its own terms?'
One of Maddocks' favourite pieces is Columba Aspexit, for its opening line which translates roughly as 'The dove flew through the lattice window'. 'The titles are always so vivid and the language is so purple, so jewelled and rich,' she says. 'Even if its origins are biblical, there's a great feeling of the [Bible book] Song of Songs, and some very poetic language.'
Von Bingen's poetic visions inspired the multisensory opera the artist and musician Nwando Ebizie has been developing since 2019, called Hildegard: Visions. She relates Hildegard's hallucinations to her own experience of a neurological syndrome called visual snow. 'People with visual snow syndrome are known to have breakdowns or feel like the world isn't real,' Ebizie explains, which is why she became interested in Hildegard's breakdown. 'Her whole body was wracked with pain, she couldn't do anything. Then a clear mission came from God, and in her 40s she had this great flourishing, because she went her own way.' Von Bingen's music wasn't written in spite of her breakdown but because of it: 'It was related to her unique perception, and connection with spirituality.'
Holter thinks the visions are what fascinate us today: 'People are interested in unique perspectives, with a greater understanding and interest in neurodiversity ... Anytime you have 'visionaries' who do things that stand outside of tradition, their work can have a kind of timeless feeling.' For Cannell, too, Von Bingen's breaking of convention makes her a hero. 'So often women are curtailed by expectations around what is 'too much', or what's acceptable in society,' she says, but with Von Bingen, 'we can look back through the centuries and see a woman both prolific and inspirational. She made stuff, and she connected with people.'