Hildegard von Bingen's Ordo Virtutum

A Musical and Metaphysical Analysis

Michael Gardiner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138288584
• eBook ISBN: 9781351974189
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

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.

1
A metaphysical medieval assemblage

Introduction

At first glance the book in front of you is perhaps an odd, seemingly incongruous amalgam of perspectives: part music theory, part Neoplatonic philosophy, part theology, and equal parts critical theory, phenomenology, and contemporary philosophy. However, the book’s principal argument marshals these resources to answer a basic question: how does Hildegard’s conception of sound, song, voice, and hearing interface with an analytic consideration of the Ordo Virtutum? While the sources may be eclectic, my answer to the question is, at its core, quite traditional (if not conservative). I argue that Hildegard’s philosophy of sound falls in line with that of both St. Augustine’s and Boethius’ conception of divine Providence, two classical pillars of a Christianized Neoplatonism inherited by the medieval West, widespread in their influence. While the argument is traditionally founded, its application to the discipline of music-theoretical analysis is, without question, new. Let’s begin with a consideration of Providence and fate before moving to its analytic implications.

In Book iv.6 of Boethius’ De Consolatione Philosophiae (ca. 524) Providence is understood as divine reason itself and is characterized by an unmoved clarity and steadfastness which enfolds all things, however disparate and boundless. When we consider the very same reality but look instead to the separate motions and movements of its individual elements, classifying them according to place, shape, and time, the same arrangement of elements is now understood as fate. Thus, creation can be envisaged through the single nature of Providence (de providentiae simplicitate) or the chain of fate (de fati serie). In fact, the two terms mutually entail each other insofar as fate is unfolded Providence, and Providence in-folded fate. Boethius writes, “this unfolding of temporal order being united in the foresight of the divine mind is providence, and the same unity when distributed and unfolded in time is called fate” [ut haec temporalis ordinis explicatio in divinae mentis adunata prospectum providentia sit, eadem vero adunata digesta atque explicata temporibus fatum vocetur].¹ Boethius’ idea of folding will become a key concept in describing how musical analysis can help us grasp structures in the mind’s ear outside of the linear flow of time, and even simulate a providential image.

Augustine’s model of the interaction between Providence and fate as outlined in Book xi of the Confessions (ca. 400) is similar, but highlights the constituent phenomena in relation to music, bringing us one step closer to Hildegard’s thought. Augustine begins with an intellectual understanding of wholeness experienced just before one begins to sing a psalm. We could say that he posits the possibility of forming an image of sound before song. That is, before he begins to sing, Augustine is sure he knows and understands the psalm taken as a whole, outside the bounds of time. He then equates this to the providential mind of God (“If there were a mind endowed with such great knowledge and prescience that all things past and future could be known in the way I know a very familiar psalm, this mind would be utterly miraculous”). I will, in turn, equate this image with an analytic under standing of a piece of music, an in-folded (implicate), non-linear organization of musical structure.

However, once a singer begins to sing Augustine relates the tension, or “distension” [distensio] experienced, as one is no longer able to hold the image of wholeness in one’s mind as the image now enters the stream of time and is there torn asunder and fragmented, giving us a more volatile and chaotic reading of fate than that of Boethius. The current chapter will augment the distended reading of fate through reference to both medieval and contemporary notions of chaos, as well as contemporary phenomenologies of hearing, which develop nomadic and immersive theories that correlate, in turn, with the soul’s groping toward salvation in the drama. What glimpses of Providence can be gleaned from within our distended and “thrown” state? To what extent do the mysteries of God remain unknown, utterly transcendent, and wholly other, even as we approach them in our thought, writing, and music (approaches that form partial images in an attempt to think beyond our limited, all too human capacities)? How do these attempts, in turn, relate to a theoretical strategy to hear providential musical structures in the mind’s ear from within the throes of a distended, linear, musical time? Such are the challenges posed to the listener.

The Ordo parses into three large parts (see Chapter 2, Table 2.1a–c for an ordered list of all sections of the drama). And, although Part I is riddled with musical distensions, deformations, and deterritorializations, in asking what glimpses of Providence might be had from within our distended state, we land upon the idea of immanence, a Providential immanence both musically and textually founded, which imparts flashes of the heavenly city from within the unfolded experience of fate. After a general introduction to the topics (Chapter 1), and the music-theoretical introduction (Chapter 2), Chapter 3 will provide a detailed analysis of Part I of the drama and its in-folded immanence as located within the more apparent distended textures. Part II of the Ordo, which takes place outside of narrative time (and thus outside the polis of human affairs), inaugurates a site for the construction of the celestial city, and will be the focus of Chapter 4. The site is the place of real contact between an in-folded perfection and the musical materiality of the drama. In some ways, the celestial city is “impossible,” what Catherine Pickstock calls an “immanentist” or “liturgical” city—its sounds, signs, and structures are at once things (res), but also that which exceeds materiality.² The material sign invokes the limit-idea, a totality which extends beyond comprehension, but whose essence can be intuited as a vestige, or trace (vestigium) in the diagrammatic cipher of the written gram. Part III of the Ordo (Chapter 5) reinforces the return to (and arrival at) the heavenly city, largely through demarcations of the drama’s symmetrical form, the most notable aspect being the fact that the drama concludes with a beginning (in principio) in the mirror of Fatherhood (paternum speculum). Namely, that which is initially deterritorialized (distended) at the beginning of the drama is re-territorialized in its formal reflection at the end of the drama as the distended musical language is likewise restored to a normative condition.

Throughout the book the idea of the fold (plica) will serve as an important tool in the process of return to a providential unity. It provides a means of thinking the continuum connecting manifest and divine realities. The fold, or the unfolding power of immanence—to give it a more dynamic form—locates a presence, a trace of the divine embedded within material creation, thereby intimating a process of reciprocal in-folding and un-folding; the One enfolds the multiple (i.e., manifestation), while the multiple unfolds the One. This manner of thought likewise connects us with the writings of Gilles Deleuze who writes about folds in a number of his books:

The presence of things to God constitutes an inherence, just as the presence of God to things constitutes an implication. An equality of being is substituted for a hierarchy of hypostases; for things are present to the same Being, which is itself present in things. Immanence corresponds to the unity of complication and explication [i.e. “in-folding” [complicatio] and “unfolding” [explicatio]], of inherence and implication. Things remain inherent in God who complicates them, and God remains implicated in things which explicate him. It is a complicative God who is explicated through all things.³

In this way we arrive at a number of variations of what is variously named “emanationism,” or “theophanic expressionism,” that is, the presence of theophanies, or the internal thoughts of God projected throughout creation. In the ninth-century philosophy of John Scotus Eriugena, for example, “each being, in its emergence and its essence, was a singular and contingent manifestation of divine plentitude, a unique theophany.”⁴ Insofar as the transcendent essence of every entity originates from within an unknowable God, the “theory of creation … tends to develop in an apophatic conception of nature.”⁵

Apophatic, or negative theology defines and knows the attributes of God solely through negation. Apophasis leaves a gap, a space to be filled by speculation, a space/place of speculation. Metaphysical speculation involves a “golden chain” of lineaments dating back to Plato, Pythagoras, the Chaldean oracle (second century AD), and other cosmological myths and sacred rites. From there, the chain continues on to Plotinus (AD 204–270) and Proclus (AD 412–485), who were interpreted, in turn, by the Latin church fathers, notably Augustine in the West, and Pseudo Dionysius (late fifth century) in the East. What connections can be found between the Greek philosophical tradition of emanation and apophatic thought? In Proclus, for example, we find cycles of emanation and return where every effect remains enfolded in its cause as it proceeds (prodos) from the divine source (the unparticipated monad), and simultaneously returns to it (epistrophe). For Dionysius, the emanation flows out of the One like a fountain outpouring from an overabundant source, an image frequently encountered in Hildegard’s writing and present in the Ordo as well. For example, in Ov 34⁶ the Virtues sing to Faith “we shall arrive at that [true] fountain through you” [pervenire ad verum fontem per te]. The generative capacities of the good as it overflows its source in ecstatic desire (erōs) creates descending grades of hierarchy, or henads. The outpouring itself is the cataphatic (from kataphasis, or “affirmation”) and is marked by the attempts of the human mind to celebrate and document God’s manifest multiplicity by making use of all its resources; writing, music, illumination, language, prayer, etc.

The effects of divine providence are described in a profusion of images and propositions drawn from scripture and philosophy. “The cataphatic ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• 1 A metaphysical medieval assemblage
• 2 Analytic introduction
• 3 Deterritorialized bodies
• 4 The taking-place of prayer
• 5 On reterritorialization
• Bibliography
• Index