I must begin by echoing my opening from January 1 of this year: I’m still here! I still have neither abandoned this project nor you! So much for that idea of posting every two weeks or so, though...
As it turned out: that online notation fundamentals course I mentioned I was designing back then did get finished and did, indeed, run as a 10-week course (compressed from its original 15-week design).
And that, dear readers, accounts for a large portion of the reason why I haven’t been here—the workload for a course such as this is nothing short of staggering! (I was, indeed, warned about that.)
This summer, two 7-week versions of it should be running, with the first having now gotten underway. So: I thought I’d better post something now, while opportunity presents itself.
It was in the mid-to-late 1980s when I first ran across Hildegard von Bingen and her 44 Symphoniae—her own musical settings of her own devotional lyrics in Latin. Both her words and music are extraordinary. Whenever I hear one of Hildegard’s works, it always gives me the impression of her striving to create a music that, in her day, did not yet exist. (That, eventually, would become polyphony, of course.) But compared with Gregorian Chant (as I do in my classes when covering Medieval music), the differences between Hildegard’s and the Gregorian versions of monody still amaze and delight.
Before I had encountered her music, though, I had picked up a volume of Hildegard’s Symphonia Armonie Celestium Revelationum in translation and with commentary by Barbara Newman (the link is for the 2nd edition), and had become familiar with a number of Hildegard’s texts that way. In the spring of 1989, I wrote a choral piece for Pentecost for the choir of Central Baptist Church of Wayne, PA; and Hildegard’s De Spiritu Sancto was my choice for text.
Like May the Words of which I wrote previously, Antiphon for the Holy Spirit is also designed to be reminiscent of early music: it is written in a (partly) neo-Renaissance contrapuntal style, complete with word-painting in a few spots, but using an unmistakably 20th century harmonic vocabulary. The notes on Soundcloud.com include the Latin text and a translation. Enjoy!
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