A Companion to Hildegard of Bingen

168 leigh-choate, flynn, and fassler
Studies Directly Concerned with Hildegard’s Music and
Select Shorter Studies
Joseph Gmelch wrote what was apparently the fijirst pamphlet-length
treatment of Hildegard’s music, and it contains a rather poor photographic
facsimile of the music of the Riesenkodex.21 Ludwig Bronarski’s
dissertation, written in 1922 at the University of Leipzig, was the fijirst analytical
study of Hildegard’s music.22 Bronarski concentrated on its formulaic
nature, fijinding the music to be a sterile patchwork of small melodic
cells. Decades passed before another scholar would write a book about
Hildegard’s chants, although Eibingen nuns (most importantly Maura
Böckeler and Pudentiana Barth) continued to edit and comment upon
them. The attention that recordings brought to Hildegard’s music (beginning
especially with Page’s Feather) reawakened scholarly interest, resulting
in Newman’s edition and translation of the song texts (1988, 2nd ed.
1998: Symph. (Eng.)).
Marianne Richert Pfau’s dissertation (1990, cited above), the fijirst full-scale
study of Hildegard’s chants since Bronarski, argues that Hildegard used formulae
creatively, as part of a generative musical process. In her dissertation,
and in an essay included in Symph. (Eng.), Pfau demonstrates that music and
texts need to be considered together to ascertain Hildegard’s compositional
strategies. Her most recent book, written with Stefan Morent, emphasizes
the theological and liturgical meanings of Hildegard’s music while offfering
analytical studies of some songs.23 Morent also offfers a detailed analysis of
the Ordo, demonstrating the symbolic role of modal choice.
Barbara Stühlmeyer’s book, Die Gesänge der Hildegard von Bingen,24
is similar to Pfau and Morent’s in orientation and remains especially
important for situating Hildegard’s music within the musical and liturgical
contexts of her time and geographical region. As such, the work compares
with Catherine Jefffreys’ dissertation, written a few years previously.25
Stühlmeyer transcribes several offfijice chants composed by others from the
21 Joseph Gmelch, Die Kompositionen der heiligen Hildegard (Düsseldorf, 1913).
22 Ludwig Bronarski, Die Lieder der heiligen Hildegard: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der
geistlichen Musik des Mittelalters (Diss., Universität Leipzig, 1922; published Zurich, 1922).
23 Pfau and Morent, Klang des Himmels.
24 Barbara Stühlmeyer, Die Gesänge der Hildegard von Bingen: Eine musikologische, theologische
und kulturhistorische Untersuchung, Studien und Materialien zur Musikwissenschaft
30 (Hildesheim, 2003).
25 Catherine M. Jefffreys, “‘Melodia et Rhetorica’: the Devotional-Song Repertory of Hildegard
of Bingen” (Diss., University of Melbourne, 2000).