Â鶹Éç

Matthew Kaner is Radio 3’s Embedded Composer in 3, in partnership with Sound and Music. Listen to the eighth of Matthew's weekly commissions for 70 at 70, a series of musical and cultural commissions to mark 70 years of Â鶹Éç Radio 3.

Matthew writes:

"This week’s work, written for the Â鶹Éç Singers, once again draws its inspiration from the past, but this time I’ve gone much further back in history. A twelfth-century composer, writer, philosopher and early scientist, Hildegard von Bingen was a truly inspiring figure. She served as magistra of her nunnery and during this time composed numerous incredibly beautiful and elaborate plainsong melodies alongside several theological and scientific texts, dramas and poetry.

Although I have previously looked to plainsong to inspire my own melodic ideas, Hildegard’s melodies are so impressively stunning that it seemed more appropriate simply to leave them in tact, and construct a piece around this material, almost as if creating an elaborate new frame for an existing work of art. My own contribution is to provide the harmonic backdrop of the piece, for which I use her text in English translation; I’ve also combined some of her single melodic lines with one another to create a richer polyphonic texture.

The particular plainsong I’ve chosen is a responsory or refrain; its first lines translate as ‘Hail Mary, authoress of life’. In essence it is a meditation on the role of the divine mother in restoring salvation by bringing her son to the world. Reframe is intended as a celebration of Hildegard’s skill and imagination as a composer and writer."

Musicians: Â鶹Éç Singers, conducted by Richard Pearce

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