Laura Cannell – The Rituals of Hildegard Reimagined

The ever prolific Laura Cannell describes first hearing the music of the composer and mystic Hildegard von Bingen around 1997 when she left rural Norfolk and embarked on the London College of Music for her undergraduate degree. Her uncle, a professor of microbiology with a keen interest in early music, played her the Canticles of Ecstasy by the long-running ensemble Sequentia, an album of Hildegard’s distinctive plainsong performed by a collection of female singers with Cannell writing ‘I confess I have been ‘borrowing’ the CD ever since’.

Sandwiched between her Year of Lore series and the Lori Goldston collaboration The Deer Are Small and the Rabbits Are Big, her new solo album reimagines the music of Hildegard, and is billed as both a secular offering and a call across the centuries while paying tribute to her uncle and processing what she describes as an anxiety disorder. Returning to the bass recorder which featured on her 2022 standout Antiphony of the Trees while adding a twelve-string knee harp, tuned in unequal temperament as a counter to the fixed pitch of the recorder, Cannell captured these twelve improvisations in single takes astride the vaulted ceilings and battered oak pews of a familiar haunt, the round-tower church of St Andrew’s in Raveningham.

Hildegard von Bingen spent her life as a Benedictine abbess in the Rhineland and from her early childhood reported a series of visions, which she called umbra viventis lucis or the reflection of the living light. Long recognised as a saint, in 2012 she was proclaimed by Pope Benedict XVI as only the thirty-fifth Doctor of the Church. She was a renowned philosopher and herbalist and even devised her own private language as a correlate to her spiritual work, yet she is perhaps best known as a prolific composer of medieval plainsong from hymns and antiphons to the Ordo Virtutum, which is recognised as the world’s oldest extant morality play.

From 1982 the Sequentia ensemble founded by Benjamin Bagby and Barbara Thornton committed to a complete edition of Hildegard’s works, beginning with the Ordo Virtutum and including their acclaimed bestseller Canticles of Ecstasy before concluding in 2013 with Celestial Hierarchy, which featured the flautist Norbert Rodenkirchen alongside a multi-generational ensemble of women’s voices and celebrated Hildegard’s formal canonisation of 2012.

Beyond the practitioners of early music her compositions have been interpreted by the filmmaker David Lynch and the musician Jocelyn Montgomery, the saxophonist and composer John Zorn and the producer and composer David Chalmin with the guitarist Bryce Dessner of The National, while the YouTube channel Hildegard von Blingin at least keeps her name in the cycle, devoted as it is to old-timey covers of popular songs featuring medieval instrumentation and Shakespearean pastiche.

Yet with her reputation as a modern day funnel of medieval forms, someone who with a naturalist bent can turn a potentially musty history of monophony and polyphony both liturgical and secular to contemporary ends in the vein of experimental folk and minimalist drone, there is nobody more suited to a crossover portrayal of Hildegard’s voice and work than Cannell, who brings a sense of real personal attachment to each of her many projects.

Hildegard collected her cycle of seventy-seven liturgical songs under the title Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum or Symphony of the Harmony of Celestial Revelations. With a nod to that phrase, the opening track from The Rituals of Hildegard Reimagined plunges us straight into a swooning and beckoning darkness. Carried by the plangent tones of the bass recorder, these ‘cosmic spheres’ are portals of self-discovery and they go where we might fear to tread. There is a blackness as well as a sense of solace to the pieces on this album, with Cannell noting that she tends to revisit Hildegard’s own compositions ‘at times when I feel overwhelmed, or when I need to reset my inner musical dialogue’, but ‘See the Moon and the Stars’ is more rustic and folksy, with a percussive element nestled between the layers of bass recorder through her fingerings and the resultant vibratos.

When the knee harp comes in on the third track its plucks and overtones carry a spectral quality which stretches beyond the title of ‘Earthly Music’, perhaps redolent of a spiritual yearning or simply a time when the course and matter of life was more proximate to death. ‘O Ignee Spiritus Reimagined’, from a hymn which the International Society of Hildegard von Bingen studies describes as so taut and sparse as to be one of her ‘less characteristic though no less poetic compositions’, to my naif ears has the quality of a festive carol, with a hint in the opening bars of the melody from ‘God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen’.

From the shorter spurts, almost like the puffs of a steam engine, which overlay the longer bass recorder drones of ‘The Rituals of Hildegard’ to the more restful yet watchful gaze of ‘Flying North’ and the cascading harp of ‘Everything is Hidden in You’, which carries the shape of a sitar in Hindustani classical raga, other songs on The Rituals of Hildegard Reimagined might call to mind such diverse fare as the Pharcyde’s reedy hip hop classic ‘Passin’ Me By’, the soundtrack including the song ‘Walking in the Air’ from the animated film The Snowman and the burgeoning, shedding harp and strings coda to ‘Go Long’ from Joanna Newsom’s triple album Have One on Me.

‘O Mater Omnis Gaudii’, perhaps a more inclusive take on Hildegard’s ‘O Pater omnium’, sounds humble and workaday, an accompaniment to life rather than a screed or salve, while ‘A Feather on the Breath’ evokes both Hildegard’s famous self-description and the 1982 album by the soprano Emma Kirkby and the British vocal ensemble Gothic Voices, an influential early music recording which was subsequently sampled by The Beloved and Orbital as a local scene for house and techno began to take shape. Cannell’s piece on the other hand blends a twinkling and lilting top line of harp with brassy spurts on the bass recorder, for a jazzy and bluesy sound which approximates the saxophone or horn and seems to utilise in a manner associated with the bass or alto of Colin Stetson a circular breathing technique.

There is a nice juxtaposition between these fuller and livelier tracks on the harp and the kind of purer sustained tones of the bass recorder. We get that mix again from ‘Ad Celestum Armoniam’ to the fountains and fireworks of ‘Everything is Hidden in You’, before the penultimate track ‘Remain Brave in a World that is being Shipwrecked’ wafts up from the hull and the closer resounds with the plaintive cry of a lone birdcall, as Cannell who has embodied the skies from rooks and crows to her spirit animal the raven signs off on Hildegard with the chug chug chug of ‘A Lost Nightingale’.