after Hildegard von Bingen
Year composed: 1997, rev. 2002
Duration: 21′
Instrumentation: string quartet
Commissioned by the National Endowment for the Arts, premiered by the Kronos Quartet, and reorded by the Alexander Quartet on the Columba aspexit album (Anthology of Recorded Music, Inc.)
Notes:
Columba aspexit is based upon a chant by Hildegard von Bingen, a twelfth-century abbess who was a renowned mystic and spiritual leader. Repeatedly seized by hallucinatory visions from an early age, she became famous for her oracular writings. Her reputation for wisdom became so great that she was consulted by famous personages across medieval Europe, including popes and kings. She dictated her visions and prophecies in a large volume called the Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum (Symphony of the Celestial Harmonies). Within this collection are fourteen chants, and columba aspexit is one of them. It presents a vision of Saint Maximinus as a celebrant at Mass, and is full of elaborate and fantastic symbolic imagery.
The music of this particular chant is strikingly unusual, both for its large range and its references to the major mode, which in combination create a kind of ecstatic and transcendent character. In each movement of my quartet, I took a different section of the chant and worked with its melodic material in my own way. I wanted to create a work which responded to the inward spirituality of this music, its breadth and scope and extraordinary imagery.
The chant first appears after a short introduction and is elaborated and treated in canon (a kind of strict imitation between members of the quartet). The canon in the first movement is followed by two other canons in movements two and four, broken up with many episodes of contrasting music. The piece is in four movements, played without pause. In the introduction there is a slow, meditative, and disjunct theme (not based upon the chant) which is marked “elegy” and recurs throughout the work. Columba aspexit is dedicated to the memory of Elisabeth Terrell Cox-Hurst.
This project was supported in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, a federal agency that supports the visual, literary, and performing arts to benefit all Americans.