A special tribute
The 12th century German Abbess Hildegard von Bingen is both the first known Western classical composer, and the only female composer to make our consensus top-100 list. Technically then I could have left her there for you to discover on your own, but because of her extraordinary position at the beginning of Western classical music, I feel she deserves more than a simple listing, and this tribute serves as a bridge to the second-100 greatest composers.
Rediscovered after more than seven centuries of neglect, Hildegard’s music, though still performed rarely and only in specialized venues, is of remarkable beauty and provides a glimpse of the state of musical art at the time.
Hildegard’s music was simple, monophonic plainchant – a single unaccompanied melodic line sung by a soloist or by a choir in unison. There were at the time some early experiments with polyphonic music (D9) – the singing or playing of more than one harmonically compatible melodic line at a time, but Hildegard preferred the monophonic tradition developed by the Christian church centuries earlier. Though working with such a limited tool set, Hildegard’s genius nevertheless shines through with some of the most beautiful monophonic music ever written. Richard Taruskin called her style "a lyricism of musitical immediacy" (A5). She had an artistic vision and expanded the expressive capabilities of contemporary plainchant.
By composer, I mean someone who creates an original piece of music, writes it down in musical notation, and appends his or her name as the author. Music in Hildegard's time, both folk music and early church music, was generally anonymous in origin and passed down orally from one performer to another, so composition as a form of permanent record was something new. There had been a variety of systems for recording melodies in antiquity, from Greece to the Asian cultures of China, India, Persia, but these were culture-specific, cumbersome, and limited.
Ancient Greek music as restored by Armand D’Angour of Jesus College, Oxford University, from classical Greek notation.
The invention of early forms of the musical notation system, in which symbols representing specific tones are placed on a grid of parallel lines, was at the behest of the Roman Catholic Church, whose leaders wished to standardize the liturgical music throughout their far-flung domain. The system evolved over the next 500 years into the simple, intuitive, and universal system we know today. Western musical notation can be easily mastered by composers, musicians, and choirs everywhere. After its introduction in the middle ages it gave rise to a proliferation of composers and musicians, well beyond the doors of the Church, and today is used globally. Musical notation did for music what written language had done for great thinkers and storytellers from Moses, Aristotle, Confucius, and Shakespeare to best-selling authors today.
The invention of Western musical notation is generally attributed to Guido of Arezzo, an Italian monk who lived approximately100 years before Hildegard, but who did not leave an identified body of musical compositions of his own. In that sense, Hildegard was the first, and so marks the transition from the anonymous and/or unwritten traditions of both folk music and early church music to music that was preserved for posterity.
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| A sample of Hildegard's musical notation. |
A composed piece of music could be longer, more complex, and more innovative than one passed down through memorization. It could also be stored, copied, transported, and performed as the composer intended hundreds of miles away or hundreds of years later. This became a powerful tool in the hands of gifted composers, resulting in the rich legacy of classical music we have today. As compositions generally had the creator’s name attached to it, composers could be remembered by history, learned from, and even ranked in books like this.
Hildegard is iconic in another important way. Remarkably and ironically, this first great composer was female, the only one so recognized in our consensus top-100 list. As we will see in these essays, women were, for the most part, discouraged from undertaking any serious musical composition or performance throughout history. They were even considered intellectually incapable of doing so by many. Lest you think such bias is ancient history, the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra held out against admitting women until 1997, and had to start using blind auditions in order to get over its lingering prejudice. In 1996, a male member of that orchestra baldly stated that “classical music has ‘gender-defined qualities’ that can be most clearly expressed by male uniformity.” (C10)
Music, however, was only the tip of the iceberg for Hildegard, who applied her extraordinary intellect to varied fields. In her position as Abbess of the Benedictine Convent of Rupertsberg, an exclusively female religious institution, Hildegard had the freedom to engage, not only in musical composition, but also in science, botany, and medicine, as well as in religious and philosophical treatises. She had an astute sense of tact, and was able to navigate around the severe restrictions on female expression at the time, to make her ideas and art known, and even won the approval of church officials. As a comparable intellect, I think of Leonardo da Vinci, who centuries later also mastered much of the day’s artistic and scientific knowledge.
Though her music may not have been familiar to succeeding generations of composers, her meticulous preservation of her works provided a gift for us today and a glimpse into the beginnings of musical composition. Many composers who followed, as we’ll see in upcoming sketches, failed to ensure such preservation, and so are known only for a fragment of their output. The power of composition is this preservation, by which we can know, enjoy, and learn from the great music of the past. In this, Hildegard von Bingen was ahead of her time.
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