Hildegard von Bingen's Ordo Virtutum: A Musical and Metaphysical Analysis

Description

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. Cover Title Copyright Contents List of illustrations 1 A metaphysical medieval assemblage Introduction Statement no. 1: concerning the outside Statement no. 2: concerning the role of theory as a speculative tool Networked space and providential folds Time and the soul Listening bubbles External immanence From sound to word: the vineyard of the text Theory as speculative response From Augustine to Lewin, Straus, and Hanninen Viscosity and intersubjectivity Twelfth-century concordances with Eriugena’s ladder of being The Ordo as object: a methodological reversal The sound of Hildegard’s symphonia 2 Analytic introduction Impossible ontographies Qui sunt hi qui ut nubes Transformation of the senses Translation and transformation Historical approaches to nodal segmentation Process, extension, and emergence Intervallic containment and commixture A transformational analysis of Ov 3 Network diagrams Networked perceptions Summary: modes of becoming 3 Deterritorialized bodies Parametric limitations of Part I Opening perfections The mechanics of mediation Analytic commentary Ov 1–5 The construction of repentance as origin and path of return Ov 3 The embodied souls Ov 5 Ov 11 The receptacle of form The unfolding of two series The first series: Ov 5, 7, 9, 13, 16 The second series: Ov 6, 10, 12, 15, 18 Conclusion of Part I: Ov 20 and 21 4 The taking-place of prayer Khora: a medievalist’s interpretation of deconstructed apophasis Prayer as passage and the place of the other The deconstructive forces of erōs Prayer as non-discursive thought Analytic commentary: Ov 22–28 Ov 30–39 Analytic commentary: tectonic transformations Mirroring, transformation, passage Second-order oscillations Procedural summary 5 On reterritorialization Dwelling Medieval drama as dwelling place of the event Spectacle and the outside-the-series Analytic events: the spectacles of Part III Ov 59 Ov 71 Ov 85 Conclusion: (or, internal refractions of a networked memory) Bibliography Index