A Companion to Hildegard of Bingen

hearing the heavenly symphony 179
Hildegard’s claim that Adam’s prelapsarian voice was similar to the
monochord is signifijicant, since many chant treatises, including those of
Aribo and John, begin with instructions for marking its soundboard with
the proportional divisions from which one could derive the notes of the
gamut. In this way, the monochord served as a useful teaching instrument
for the practice of music and for demonstrating, through musical
intervals, the theory of the harmonic proportions and order found in both
microcosmos and macrocosmos, humanity and creation, and therefore (in
Hildegard’s words) “every kind of music.”57 By using its entire range in
O vos angeli, Hildegard signaled the connection between angelic song and
the prelapsarian capabilities of Adam’s voice.
A similar reference to Adam’s voice occurs in the famous letter of 1178,
in which Hildegard argues that human skill, by imitating the prophets,
had helped recover this prelapsarian, angelic music for her own day. Here
she uses the terms organa and iuncturae digitorum. If one suspects her
claim to have no knowledge of music theory, whether as a modesty topos
or as a reference to the time when her songs were originally created, the
fijirst of these terms appears to refer to organized polyphony (organa), and
the second to the so-called Guidonian hand in which the iuncturae digitorum
(the 14 joints and 5 fijingertips) serve as a mnemonic representation
of the Guidonian gamut:
Zealous and wise men imitated them, i.e. the holy prophets, and they
invented through human art many kinds of organa, so that they could sing
for the delight of the soul; and what they were singing they fijitted to the
joints of the fijingers (iuncturae digitorum), which are inclined to bending,
also recalling that, before he failed, Adam, in whose voice was the sound of
all harmony and the sweetness of the whole musical art, had been formed
by the fijinger of God, who is the Holy Spirit.58
Although the passage can be (and has been) translated so the references
to organa and iuncturae refer to the playing of instruments in imitation
of the prophets, such a translation does not do justice to the idea that the
wise men of Hildegard’s day fijitted (adaptuerunt) what they were singing
57 Idem: “omne genus musicorum.”
58 Epistolarium, I, 23, p. 65: “Quos, uidelicet sanctos prophetas, studiosi et sapientes
imitati, humana et ipsi arte nonulla organorum genera inuenerunt, ut secundum delectationem
anime cantare possent; et que cantabant, in iuncturis digitorum, que flexionibus
inclinantur, adaptuerunt, ut et recolentes Adam digito dei, qui Spiritus Sanctus est, formatum,
in cuius uoce sonus omnis harmonie et totius musice artis, antequam delinqueret,
suauitas erat.”