Hildegard of Bingen has been called by her admirers "one of the most



important figures in the history of the Middle Ages," and "the

greatest woman of her time." Her time was the 1100's, she was born in

1098. She was the daughter of a knight, and when she was eight years

old she went to the Benedictine monastery at Mount St Disibode to be

educated. The monastery was in the Celtic tradition, and housed both

men and women in separate quarters. When Hildegard was eighteen, she

became a nun. Twenty years later, she was made the head of the female

community at the monastery. Within the next four years, she had a

series of visions, and devoted the ten years from 1140 to 1150 to

writing them down, describing them which included drawing pictures of

what she had seen, and commenting on their interpretation and

significance. During this period, Pope Eugenius III sent a commission

to inquire into her work. The community of nuns at Mount St. Disibode

was growing rapidly, and they did not have adequate room. Hildegard

accordingly moved her nuns to a location near Bingen, and founded a

monastery for them completely independent of the double monastery they

had left. She oversaw its construction, which included such features

as water pumped in through pipes. Hildegard traveled throughout

southern Germany and into Switzerland and as far as Paris, preaching.

Her sermons deeply moved people, and she was asked to provide written

copies. In the last year of her life, she was briefly in trouble

because she provided Christian burial for a young man who had been

excommunicated. Her defense was that he had repented on his deathbed,

and received the sacraments. Her convent was subjected to an

interdict, but she protested eloquently, and the interdict was

revoked. She died on September 17, 1179. Her surviving works include

more than a hundred letters to emperors and popes, bishops, nuns, and

nobility. Many persons of all classes wrote to her, asking for advice,

and one biographer calls her "the Dear Abby of the twelfth century.

She wrote 72 songs including a play set to music. Musical notation had

only shortly before developed to the point where her music was

recorded in a way that we can read today. Accordingly, some of her

work is now available on compact disk, and presumably sounds the way

she intended. Certainly her compositional style is like nothing else

we have from the twelfth century.

The history of late twelfth-century polyphony was first written a

hundred years after the event by a monk who may have come from Bury St

Edmunds; history has not entrusted us with his name and he is usually

referred to by the title he received when his dissertation was first

published in the nineteenth century: Anonymous IV. Anonymous as he

was, he tells us about one of the most important composers of the

fifty years either side of 1200: the magistri Leoninus, we are told,

wrote a cycle of two-part settings of the most important chants in the

liturgical year - Christmas, Easter, Assumption and other feasts; this

cycle was called the Magnus liber organi - 'the great book of

organum'. Organa of the type that make up Leoninus' Magnus liber

organi are polyphonic settings of plainsong. The original chants

employ two musical styles: the solo sections are elaborately

melismatic and contrast with the simpler, more syllabic, sections sung

by the schola. It is the melismatic solo sections of the chant that

are set polyphonically. The result is that a performance of organum

involves polyphony and plainsong. Most of the music for the office

written by Leoninus and his contemporaries consisted of settings of

responsories. A responsorial was made up of a respond followed by a

verse, followed by a repeat of part of the original respond. The

'Gloria patri' follows, and the work concluded with either the

complete responsorial or a part thereof, depending on the status of

the feast. Within each of these main sections are settings of both

solo and choral chants. The respond consists of just the first couple

of words set in polyphony followed by the rest of the choral chant;

the verse is entirely set in polyphony; the partial repeat of the

respond is always in plainsong; the 'Gloria patri' is set sometimes in

polyphony, and sometimes left as plainsong. In the case of the

responsorial 'Sedit angelus' 8 'Crucifixum in carne', two settings are

preserved in the principal manuscript for this repertory, and Red Byrd

perform them both. In a liturgical context, only one of these would

have been used. Leoninus' organa dupla of the Magnus liber organi took

the plainsong and did one of two things with it, the more syllabic

sections of the chant that he set, he laid out the lowest part, the

tenor, in long notes and wrote highly elaborate, rhapsodic lines above

it, the duplum. This style of music was called organum per se.

Alternatively, he took the long melismas of the chant and organized

them into repeating rhythmic cells and wrote a correspondingly tight

rhythmic duplum above it. The rhythmic organization of this procedure

gave rise to what are called the rhythmic modes, this style was called

discantus. Both types of music exist within the same composition; the

sections based on highly melismatic chants that use the rhythmic modes

are called clausulae when they are given discrete forms.