The question of instruments and dance in Hildegard of Bingen's twelfth-century music drama Ordo Virtutum

The question of instruments and dance in Hildegard of Bingen's twelfth-century music drama Ordo Virtutum There are many similarities in the arguments for and against the presence of dance and those for and against the use of instruments in liturgically related items in the Middle Ages. In contemporary iconography, for example, celestial beings are shown both playing instruments and dancing—and yet both activities were the subject of much ecclesiastical opposition. The question of instruments is raised in a letter written by Hildegard in 1178 to the prelates of Mainz, who had placed her convent under an interdict (meaning that the nuns could no longer hear mass, receive the eucharist, or sing the divine office):1 I also beheld something about the fact that, obeying you, w e have till now ceased to celebrate the divine office in song, reading it only in a low voice: I heard a voice from the living lighttellof the diverse kinds of praises, of which David says in the Psalms: 'Praise him in the call of the trumpet, praise him on psaltery and lute, praise him on the tambour and in dancing, praise him on strings and on organ, praise him on resonant cymbals, praise him on cymbals of jubdation—let every spirit praise the Lord!' In these words outer realities teach us about inner ones—namely how, in accordance with the material composition and quality of instruments, w e can best transform and shape the performance of our inner being towards praises of the Creator. If w e strive for this lovingly, w e recall h o w m a n sought the voice of the living spirit, which A d a m lost through disobedience—he who, still innocent before his fault had no little kinship with the sounds of the angels' praises . . . But in order that mankind should recall that divine sweetness and praise by which, with the angels, A d a m was made jubilant in God before he fell, instead of recalling A d a m in his banishment, and that mankind too might be stined to that sweet praise, the holy prophets— taught by the same spirit, which they had received—not only composed psalms and canticles, to be sung to kindle the devotion of listeners; but also they invented musical instruments of diverse kinds with this in view, by which the songs could be expressed in multitudinous sounds, so that listeners, aroused and made adept outwardly, might be nurtured within by the forms and qualities of the instruments, as by the meaning of the words performed with them. 1 The translation of part of the letter given here is taken from Peter Dronke, Women Writers of the Middle Ages: A Critical Study of Texts from Perpetua (f203) to Marguerite Porete (fl310), Cambridge, 1984, pp. 197-98, with a Latin transcription of portions of the letter, including the passage cited, pp. 313-15, n. 101. The Latin text is also available in Patrologia Latina, ed. J.P. Migne (PL), 197, Paris, 1882, cols. 218c-21d. 46 R. Lightbourne Eager and wise men imitated the holy prophets, inventing human kinds of harmonized melody (organa) by their art, so that they could sing in the delight of their soul; and they adapted their singing to [the notation indicated by] the bending of thefinger-joints,2 as it were recalling that A d a m was formed by the finger of God, which is the Holy Spirit, and that in Adam's voice before he fell there was the sound of every harmony and the sweetness of the whole art of music. And if A d a m had remained in the condition in which he was formed, human frailty could never endure the power and the resonance of that voice. But when his deceiver, the devil, heard that man had begun to sing through divine inspiration, and that he would be transformed through this to remembering the sweetness of the songs of the heavenly land— seeing the machinations of his cunning going awry, he became so terrified that... he has not ceased to trouble or destroy the affirmation and beauty and sweetness of divine praise and of the...