Pérotin is a considerably more shadowy historical figure than Hildegard, in that very little is known about him (get used to that when dealing with indivudals from a thousand years ago). In this regard her work anticipates the innovations that her later medieval and Renaissance successors would soon carry out. Her use of elaborate melisma is another hallmark, which reflects an unusually close correspondence between music and text. Her music is entirely monophonic, featuring a lone melodic line like all plainsong of the period - Gregorian chant or otherwise - but it’s distinguished by constructive adventurousness and emotive power. Composed circa 1151, her morality play Ordo Virtutum ranks among the most monumental achievements of the era. Her musical output, consisting of 69 compositions - each with its own original poetic text - is one of the largest surviving medieval repertoires. She was a quite extraordinary individual. As the abbess of two such convents in the German Rhineland, Hildegard would rise to become one of the most revered scholars in Europe.Ĭomposer, playwright, theologian, philosopher, healer, saint. In convents scattered across Europe, well-respected communities of nuns studied, wrote, prayed, and served God. A bastion of that society was of course the all-powerful Latin Church, which happens to be not only the very home of the tradition we’re exploring, but also an area where women were far more empowered than you might expect. Males prevailed in all aspects of life, and together worked to perpetuate their own dominance.
Middle Age Europe in general was an enormous boys’ club.
From nearly a millennium ago, Hildegard of Bingen offers modern ears some of the most pioneering and expressive music of the first centuries of the story of classical music. It’s all the more remarkable, then, that from the farthest reaches of the tradition that we can call ‘classical music’, it is a woman’s voice that connects to us. It still is of course, though momentous and encouraging changes are well underway. The best composers of the medieval periodĬlassical music has been, for the vast majority of its history, a world dominated by men. No list of the Middle Ages’ greatest would be close to complete without that titan of the period. Hildegard’s entry has been transferred from the list of the greatest classical composers - the only medieval artist to be featured there. So our composer countdown begins in the so-called ‘high’ medieval era, in the 1100s with Hildegard von Bingen, and ends with Guillaume Dufay, a transitional figure between our period and the revolutionary Renaissance developments, which were cultivated most of all by Josquin des Prez, Thomas Tallis and Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina. And for that reason, it’s only in the subsequent centuries that we begin to find composers that left behind written work. It was only in the early eleventh century, through the innovations of the monk Guido d’Arezzo that musical notation was developed (read more about him in the blog’s history of sheet music ). The medieval period, also known as the Middle Ages, broadly covers the era spanning the fall of the Roman Empire circa 500 AD and the spread throughout Europe of the ideas of the Italian Renaissance, a millennium later in 1500.Īs far as music’s concerned, little is known about what went down in the first five hundred years - the ‘early’ medieval period. But the music of this expansive, turbulent and - now so long in the past - almost mystical era offers clarity and authenticity that much later music would do well to match. They're far quicker to look to Bach, Mozart and the rest. Medieval music, and early music more widely, is often neglected by fans of the classical tradition that it founded.
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