CHANNELLING THE ECSTASY OF HILDEGARD VON BINGEN: “O EUCHARI” REMIXED

Abbess Hildegard von Bingen (1098–1179) became an unexpected cult figure in the final decades of the twentieth century, when her life and work were used as the stimulus for numerous cultural products, from imagined autobiographies to film. Her adoption as a quasifeatured artist by creators of electronic dance music (EDM) was surprisingly commercially successful, chiming with Michael Embach’s view that:

No other medieval figure has been as subject to transitions that have strayed so profoundly from an authentic impression, moving through myth and legend, and finally into pure fiction. 1 Hildegard's reception at this time rested on cultural understandings of her as a visionary, a nun whose spirituality had almost magical qualities. Her mysticism, her isolation as a well-documented female composer of the twelfth century, and her melodic style led to Hildegard's association with 'ecstasy' -both in the meanings found to be inherent to her music, and with the interpretation of her works in performance and re-composition. This chapter will examine the ways in which notions of female ecstasy also informed the use of Hildegard's music in ambient house and New Age tracks that sampled the song "O Euchari": The Beloved's "The Sun Rising" (1989), Orbital's "Belfast" (1991), and Richard Souther's "Vision (O Euchari in Leta Via)" (1994).
Medievalism was threaded through diverse genres of the late 1980s and 1990s, from Viking imagery in heavy metal to the popularity of crossover groups such as the Mediaeval Baebes. 2 This appropriation of ancient culture also drove the reuse of Hildegard's music by those working in dance and ambient genres. The timbral qualities of the voice type fashionable in early music performances were appealing to electronic music composers, whose female-voice samples were similarly pure in tone, and to their listeners. Such presentations of women's vocality in popular and electronic genres were typically ethereal, wordless, and passive in the mix. However, the three examples discussed here were released during a time when a number of prominent women musicians actively challenged stereotypes. The analysis of three songs featuring the "O Euchari" sample will therefore consider the ways in which Hildegard's music is lent different levels of agency and meaning, depending on its manipulation by modern composers and arrangers. As representative of a 'female voice' -both literally and in terms of its performance of Hildegard's historical and creative voice -I am interested to consider the extent to which the Hildegard sample aligns which the presentation of other such voices. I will situate the "O Euchari" songs within the context of female-voice tracks of the 1980s and 1990s, and offer a comparison with the monastic chanting sampled by Enigma, demonstrating the contrasting ways in which signifiers of gender and spirituality functioned in popular music. What can the use of diverse writings covered almost every available topic of her day, from the political to the spiritual and from aspects of natural philosophy to physiological studies of the human body. 3 A figure of Catholic devotion for centuries, Hildegard's story provided ample evidence of her sanctity, but it took until 2012 for her official canonisation to occur. Hildegard's theology, her interest in the natural world, and her political involvement with religious and secular leaders across Europe has meant that her biography -unlike that of so many other remarkable women -was never entirely erased from historical accounts in her native Germany. She has been venerated in various ways since her death. 4 In the English-speaking world, studies of Hildegard were encouraged by feminists' search for marginalised figures to add to the historical canon. Perhaps surprisingly to musicians familiar with her creative output, Hildegard's compositions did not play a prominent role in the early reception of her influence during the medieval and early modern periods, or even during the nineteenth century. They are far from insubstantial: 77 individual liturgical songs, plus a further collection of songs that form her morality play Ordo virtutum.
A catalyst for the wider interest in Hildegard's musical output was the release of A Feather on the Breath of God (1982), a full album of her devotional chants, performed in various vocal and instrumental combinations by Gothic Voices (directed by Christopher Page). 5 A second influential 'classical' album of her music, Canticles of Ecstasy: Hildegard von Bingen, was released to critical acclaim by Sequentia in 1994. 6 Both recordings tapped into the idea that Hildegard's music was 'ecstatic', a word that was regularly used in connection with the style of her song and for marketing purposes. 7 The term 'ecstasy' conjured Hildegard's reputation as the 'Sibyl of the Rhine'; it also resonated with aspects of popular culture of the 1980s and 1990s in which trance-like states, not least through the use of the drug MDMA ('ecstasy'), were part of the club scene, and thus served as a meeting point for medieval and modern cultural references. The presence of Hildegard's music in commercially released recordings has grown far beyond the 30 or so releases assessed by Jennifer Bain in her 2008 study of Hildegard's musical 'ecstasy'. Hildegard's songs have formed part of compilations as well as -unusually for a composer of plainchant -many albums entirely dedicated to her music. Even more remarkably, Hildegard's devotional music has reached diverse audiences through its performance and reworking by musicians ranging from enclosed Benedictine nuns to classically-trained professional early musicians, and from performers steeped in world, folk, and New Age traditions to those in electronic dance music.
The recordings by Gothic Voices and Sequentia tapped into a particular trend in the 1980s and 1990s, as popular demand for examples of historical, female-centred spirituality played a role in the New Age movement. New Age's spiritual themes were diffuse, drawing liberally on diverse religious and quasi-spiritual traditions. Particularly attractive to its audience were ritualistic and shamanic practices, since they offered an apparent connection to ancient wisdom, often in unfamiliar linguistic traditions (Latin song, Buddhist chanting, Native American incantation) whose texts were used for sonic meditation more than semantic meaning. Music was an integral part each offering a female-centred perspective to a New Age readership. 9 As part of these developments, Hildegard gained the uncommon distinction of being one of the few medieval composers whose reputation had crossed from the ivory towers of academia into public awareness. 10 Hildegard's chants were not the only medieval songs to be remixed in the 1980s and 1990s. When EDM, ambient house, New Age, and rave culture appropriated the sound world of pre-modern spirituality into new electronic contexts, they frequently drew on monastic chant, which was also experiencing crossover success at this time, whether remixed or sung unaccompanied as a relaxation aid. 11 One of the most popular bands of the period, German group Enigma, achieved commercial success with tracks sampling malecommunity Gregorian chant ("Sadeness (Part I)", from MCMXC a.D., 1990, which sold 5,000,000 copies), and male-voice Native American chanting ("Return to Innocence", The Cross of Changes, 1994). 12 However, the sampling of Hildegard's song had more to do with the typical ways that the female voice had traditionally been presented in electronic musical media as it did with its historical, liturgical roots. The reason for the particular appeal of Hildegard's 'female voice' therefore demands some careful scrutiny, as it arguably had much to do with the marketing and reception of the Gothic Voices recording from which Emily van Evera's performance of "O Euchari" was sampled.
The award-winning A Feather on the Breath of God received substantial attention from outside the traditional early music world. Three factors made Hildegard an obvious choice for those seeking a sample of early chant (initially without permission or credit): her chaste, idealised femininity, her mysticism, and the heightened public awareness of her song. What better to feature on an album of New Age or electronic music than the 'voice' of a nun who experienced mystical visions, wrote spiritual/sensual poetry, and who was already at the top of the classical charts? But there was a further factor at play: namely the underlying resonance between Hildegard's chants and the conceptual basis for ambient music more broadly, as neatly articulated by Brian Eno in his album notes for Music for Airports. Of the modern genre, Eno wrote that "Ambient Music must be able to accommodate many levels of listening attention without enforcing one in particular; it must be as ignorable as it is interesting". 13 Essentially, then, it was music in which the listener was paramount, but who was also expected to seek sounds that could be engaged with, or not, in equal measure. In Page's notes to A Feather on the Breath of God, the director included the following guidance on the ideal manner for plainchant performance: 12 The Gregorian chant samples on hit singles "Sadeness" and "Mea Culpa" were taken, without permission, from the album Paschale Mysterium, performed by Capella Antiqua München (dir. Konrad Ruhland, Sony Classical, B00XZRPKOG, 1977).
Ideally, [medieval] singers were to allow their activity to absorb the whole spirit and body, inducing a state of meditative calm and so intensifying the quality of devotional life. Distractions […] were therefore to be avoided. Discretion was the basis of the ideal: voices betraying a poised, attentive spirit dwelling upon the inner meaning of the text, sensitive to musical nuances but never seduced by them. 14 The relationship between the two ostensibly different musical genres is one of common levels of perception within the frame of musical time: rather than anything standing out, distracting the listener's attention, both Gothic Voices' performance of plainchant and Eno's ambient music emphasise meditative practice. Page's words share an affinity with Eno's definition. The listener could, perhaps even should, be only minimally aware or casually stimulated by the sounds of devotional chant. Even the medieval singer performed mainly as a functional aid to calmness of thought, perhaps mindful of St Augustine's advice that one should enjoy the prayerful message of song but fall short of allowing it to incite the body to dancing or other sinful pleasures. It is a trope of medieval religious writing that song might have such effects, and that women were both more susceptible to them and more naturally inclined to seduce others with their siren-like voices. 15 Arguably, then, both the Gothic Voices' recording of Hildegard's music and the electronically manipulated versions of her song held in common their wrestling with the presence of the potentially distracting, even unruly, female voice in the mix. A final irony remains in that the ability of ambient music to make women's voices even more ignorable than usual, in fact facilitated widespread awareness and opportunities to hear Hildegard's song.
The three main areas on which the present discussion will focus all relate to just one of Hildegard's songs, "O Euchari" (Fig. 1). The song -whose four double versicles last over five minutes in performance -is a poem in honour of the missionary, St Eucharius, a figure of veneration for the community of Trier (where he served as Bishop) and elsewhere. In Hildegard's chant, the opening melody soars upwards in a manner found elsewhere in her output, from the opening note to an octave above by way of the fifth, emphasising those intervals. 16 The rising opening gesture of "O Euchari" is aurally striking, and helps to situate the remaining, more step-wise melody within the Phrygian frame that is gradually established, and is confirmed by the F natural towards the end of the first phrase. The lyric's distinctive "O" opening recalls the "O" antiphons, medieval devotional chants performed at Vespers in the final part of Advent, each praising attributes of Christ and the Blessed Virgin Mary ("O Sapientia", "O Clavis David", etc.). The text is a joyous praise of Eucharius, and this aspect of celebration is well matched by moments of melisma (more than one note per syllable), which function to emphasise closing syllables of lines and verses in particular.
& oe oe oe oe oe oe oe oe oe oe oe oe oe oe oe oe oe oeoe oe oe oe oe oe oe oe oe oe oe oe oe oe The tracks that sample Hildegard's music all sit within the broad genre of electronic music, but they function quite differently in the particular ways that Hildegard's music is used and transformed, and what cultural meanings are signified. Although there were various recording styles already available to electronic music composers -including performances of Hildegard's 16 On the stylistic features of Hildegard's music that have been marked out as personally distinctive, and the problems with this perception, see Jennifer Bain, "Hildegard, Hermannus, and Late Chant Style," Journal of Music Theory 52, no. 1 (2008), 123-49. Bain demonstrates that the gesture as found at the beginning of "O Euchari" is not peculiar to Hildegard's music, but instead is typical of eleventh-and twelfth-century chant composition lying outside of Gregorian repertory; Bain, "Hildegard, Hermannus"; 124, 146. songs by nuns, monks, classical singers and diverse instrumentalists -they all selected the Gothic Voices track as the basis for new work. Therefore, I will take Bain's claim that "the style of musical presentation itself […] can shape the image of who Hildegard was for anyone listening", and use it to test what that might mean when all three share the same initial performance material. 17 I am chiefly interested in three areas: the use of Hildegard's song to create a sense of timelessness; the use of "O Euchari" in relation to the idea of 'ecstasy', also fundamental to ambient, house, New Age and rave cultures; and finally in the importance of female-centred spirituality to the three remixes.
Susana Loza has identified various ways in which human voices are manipulated by technology in electronic dance music, and of the five categories she describes, four are particularly relevant to the ways in which the "O Euchari" sample is used in remixes and are worth summarising here. 18 First, although all three employ material that has been excised from the original track, The Beloved's mix can be seen to employ a basic 'cut-up' (Loza's first technique), in which the sample can be heard as more nonsensical than in its original context; this is enhanced by their use of the sample as a 'diva loop' (technique five), in which "the female voice is electronically eroticised and/or the exaggerated peak of one natural(ised) and ultrafeminised orgasmic cry", "sonically spliced and mechanically (re)produced until it surpasses the borders of believability". 19 In both the Beloved and Orbital's mixes, Loza's second technique, the 'Moebius loop', produces "a haunting echo that multiplies until it collapses upon itself in a series of surreal and interconnected ellipses"; 20 this effect is also part of the outro material to "Vision" by Richard Souther. Her third technique, which is the use of vocoder, is not part of these remixes, and that in itself reminds us of the central importance of the qualities of the singer's original vocal in creating meaning in subsequent arrangements.
Orbital play with the speed of the sample more than the other two artists.
Timelessness and medievalism: Orbital, "Belfast" (1991) Eight minutes long in its commercial release, Orbital's track "Belfast" places the chosen sample of Hildegard / van Evera in two main sections (Fig. 2). 21 There are only a handful of main elements to the piece: a high-pitched, oscillating melodic motif; a high-pitched percussive element that provides a surface rhythm; a mid-range harmonic wash evoking vocal timbres; lowpitched material that serves as a harmonic underpinning; and the sample itself. In the middle of the track, a version of the high-pitched, oscillating material is developed as a continuous keyboard melody, before a break and re-building of the track, accompanied by a more active bass riff and the reentry of the sample within the full texture at a slightly reduced tempo. When we reach that point, whatever happened will happen again". 22 Thus Orbital's tracks play with trance-inducing verbal and sonic repetition and also with speed, especially after the main break, and the use of a sample of looped Hildegard in "Belfast" ties in well with their aesthetic more generally.
However, although the Hildegard / van Evera sample is looped, this is not to the extent that the vocal "collapses upon itself " as might be identified by is a simple device, but it is a clear early music signifier that conflicts with the synthesised sounds that subsequently enter the track on higher pitch material.  Musical ecstasy and female sexual purity: The Beloved, "The Sun Rising" The Beloved's remix of "O Euchari" is arguably most typical of the more problematic ways in which women's voices have been represented within electronic dance music, exemplifying Loza's descriptions of the dehumanisation of voices through multiple loops, creating amplified peaks that we might read here as 'ecstatic'. The 'ecstatic' female voice has a long and frequently thorny relationship with electronic music genres, in which the ubiquity of women's passive, manipulated voices can be contrasted with the relative historical absence of women from the recording studio. 26 The binary gender split in studio-based music is typically understood as a divide between 'male/techno/wizardry' and male authors' creative manipulation of a 'diva loop'. 27 The gendered discourse surrounding technology has changed little since the early 1980s when it attracted criticism for the relative power imbalance that saw women as users rather than makers of music technologies.
As Rebekah Farrugia has articulated, the consensus among feminist scholars across disciplines is that "technology is not inherently masculine, but has been labeled as such as a result of socially constructed narratives, rhetorical devices and material practices". 28 The tracks discussed here employ rhetorical devices that highlight different aspects of gender, as well as other markers of identity such as age and ethnicity.
Typically, in electronic (and many other) music genres, the female voice comes to signify the passive object of desire; a siren-like presence from the mix.
As Dominic Pettman has remarked, the female voice in acousmatic music has an intimate quality: "a voice with no visible source", he writes, "is all the more enchanting and all-enveloping". 29 In many electronic works, the female voice not only remains passive, it lacks any agency other than apparently expressing sensual pleasure, itself a stereotype in the cultural understanding of women's vocality more broadly. When we hear van Evera in the mix, then, she sounds her own desirability. A further layer is the presentation by van Evera of Hildegard's musical and creative body, the voice of a nun; although Hildegard lived to an advanced age, her vow of chastity ensured that she maintained a body free from sexual activity, and from the subsequent markers of women's aging bodies such as childbirth. This archetype of sexual unavailability has made nuns the focus of much insinuation, humour, suspicion and even desire for hundreds of years across diverse media. One might conclude that far from being passive, Hildegard's vows signify her body as virginal, imaginatively untouched by a lover, and thus more sexually heightened for the listener than a non-religious voice might suggest. Hildegard's melody may itself even be considered as sirenlike, a form in which verbal articulation is less important than its pleasurable sound of "O". In doing so, it would offer an example of what Adriana Caverero has described as a key role for women's voices in music: In her erotic function as seductress, as an object of masculine desire, the woman appears first of all as a body and as an inarticulate voice.
She must be beautiful, but she must not speak. What she can do, however, is emit pleasing sounds, asemantic vocalizations, moans of pleasure. 30 Discussions of the common aesthetic preference for sopranos in electronic music typically emphasise the cultural understanding of 'purity' of this voice type -a term attributed to both adult sopranos and to the voices of children. 31 The appeal of 'pure' voices was a feature not only in electronic works of the mid-to-late twentieth century, but also to the parallel early music revival in which Emma Kirkby, for example, was marketed as possessing the voice of an angel: pure, sweet, youthful and by implication virginal. 32 When we hear Hildegard's music presented as a 'diva loop' in these ambient house tracks, the very fact that it is performed using a soprano gives the illusion that we are hearing a voice recorded not ten but 840 years ago: as if we are hearing the voice of Hildegard herself. One well-known story recounts that Hildegard was once seen singing "O virga ac diadema" as she walked round her abbey, a recollection that has remained a stubborn part of her reception, even though it is likely fictive. Although we know nothing of the precise performance situation of Hildegard's music -which may well have been performed communally, by groups of men or women, or as a solo song, in or outside the liturgy, with or without instruments -the use of just one, unaccompanied female voice evokes Hildegard herself.  The reduced sample of "O Euchari" used in "The Sun Rising" encourages an analysis that considers the employment of this very short musical extract to build a larger, meditative canvas based on the musical ecstasy so often perceived within the melodic gesture in the notes of the song's opening phrase. The word 'ecstasy' has long been frequently associated with Hildegard's music, so tied up is her musical output with our idea of her as a visionary, even though Hildegard's visions "never occurred in ecstasy [trance], but rather while she was awake". 34 The most obvious example is the naming of Sequentia's recording, Canticles of Ecstasy, but it was also an important part of the way in which Gothic Voices' musical director, Christopher Page, framed Hildegard's musical style: One of the problems with her is that she is always in ecstasy, as someone once said of her, 'anything will set her off ' [...]. The amount of variety she can display in her musical compositions, ranging from very simple and short pieces -where more or less every syllable has a note -to these vast sequences, which are among the most luxuriant compositions of the Middle Ages -the range she shows is really terrific. 35 In a later interview, though still wedded to her music as ecstatic, Page was less convinced by the variety of Hildegard's style, going as far as to suggest a lack of authenticity in the particular part of her creative expression associated the opening phrases are redeployed as a chorus or refrain. 42 Reverberation and other forms of processing are used to emulate the acoustic of a large abbey church. The sound world is initially characterised by van Evera's plaintive, unaccompanied voice, before the introduction of the sort of instrumental textures that were broadly described as 'ethnic' at that time -marimba, bells, percussion, pan pipes, maracas, flutes -as well as an increasing presence of synthesised sound and eventually a wash of choral textures as a backing. This is Hildegard for New Age spiritual meditation, but in many ways it takes the creative voice of the medieval composer more seriously than the others, albeit with Souther's rearrangement of her melody.

The significance of Latin lyric
For many, perhaps even most, modern listeners, the semantic meaning of the Latin poetry in "O Euchari" would have been beyond their comprehension.
One might therefore hear the song as part of the commonplace sound of sampled, wordless female voice in electro-acoustic music, or of live female voice with electronics. Bosma has, for example, argued that the proliferation of such scorings -not least in contrast with the relatively smaller number of works for low-voice male singers and electronics -is a cultural trope signalling the disempowerment of women and the feminine in electronic music. 43 Considered in isolation, the opening syllable "O" is the sort of female orgasmic cry that was ubiquitous in dance and soul genres, and which featured iconically, albeit incongruously, in Bodyform sanitary towel commercials in the 1990s in order to signal female empowerment. 44 (here female) mouth, a traditional focus of the male gaze, inviting us to hear the nun's voice as more sexually aware than her chaste vocation might otherwise permit.
Arguably, though, the use of Latin-texted, rather than textless, song in the remainder of the samples carries its own cultural associations, even though most of the listening audience would not have been expected to understand the devotional theology of her poetry.   46 Yri offers a detailed discussion of the album, and emphasizes the peaceful, spiritual and nostalgic aspects of "Sadeness" in "Medieval Uncloistered", 128-48. The "O Euchari" sample was therefore attractive because it conveyed traditional notions of white women's youthfulness and chastity, not only via an absence of sexuality in a passive sense, but also in an emphasised non-presence of the corporeal. Historically, women's sexual abstinence has been framed as highly contested, frequently under threat, and in some ways therefore the epitome of disempowerment; one need think only of the problematic marketing strategies of Charlotte Church or Britney Spears to see how burgeoning sexual maturity has been used to build media appeal.
Even in medieval lyrics, such as the chanson de nonne genre, it is clear that the narrative positions expressed in songs written from the point of view of young novices were designed to give the impression that their subjects are willing to be corrupted, to seduce, or are more sinful than they ought to be. 52 Hildegard's historical body was chaste; modern presentation of Hildegard, however, often commented on her apparent sexual frustration, of her suspiciously heightened longing for male saints such as a Eucharius phrase was heard dozens of times in succession, not least during all-night events where the track would be used to accompany the actual sunrise. 53 In these performances, Hildegard's voice is launched upwards, an orgasmic voice from the ancient past looped in its ultimate release into the dawn.

Conclusion
There seems little doubt that in sampling van Evera's performance of While all three of the tracks discussed here explore Hildegard's music in the spirit of medievalism found across popular genres in the 1980s and 1990s more widely, their common sample has offered opportunities to interpret their different manipulations of sound and meaning. Such image management in production emphasised aspects of Hildegard's song relevant to the creative context of each remix. Some of these, notably the pure, virginal tone of soprano van Evera, connect strongly to both the early music movement of the same decades, and to the ubiquitous high, youthful, 'white' and often female voice in mainstream electronic music. In spite of her ventriloquism through van Evera's vocal, songs featuring Hildegard lie at various distances from what Bosma would recognise as the powerless utterances of a disembodied female voice. Although in Souther's work, and to some extent Orbital's, Hildegard is the ultimate 'featured artist', all three "O Euchari" songs simultaneously replay problematic, nostalgic fantasies of women's musical bodies and voices.