--| Hildegard von Bingen |-----
--| A Feather On The Breath Of God |-----

"Listen: there was once a king sitting on his throne.
Around him stood great and wonderfully beautiful columns ornamented
with ivory, bearing the banners of the king with great honour.
Then it pleased the king to raise a small feather from the ground
and he commanded it to fly. The feather flew, not because of
anything in itself but because the air bore it along. This am i..."

 "With a great desire I have desired to come to you and
  rest with you in the marriage of Heaven, running to you by a
  new path as the clouds course in the purest air like sapphire."

** A Note on Performance: Medieval Latin has no exact equivalent
   of the verb "to perform"; it is a language which does
  not precisely identify the self-conscious and extrovert activity
  that we associate with 'performing'.

  This is suggestive in a number of ways and, as far as the
  music of Hildegard is concerned, it is easy to understand. Consider
  the habits of medieval monastic readers: the more spiritual meaning
  a text was thought to embody, the more they internalised it by
  a process which they frequently compared to digestion, absorbing
  the words in tranquility, then ruminating upon them to release
  the nourishing spiritual senses.

-- 

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this page last updated: april 12, 2000