What I want to listen to when I'm sick

When I get sick I hope I can somehow shut out the frightening noises in the hospital and listen to the ancient vocal music of Hildegard von Bingen. Even when I am not sick I find the music deeply relaxing and comforting.  Music like this should be perfect to help reduce the anxiety that everyone feels as a patient in a hospital.

But it is always hard to pick music for others. You may find the music repetitious, flat and dull. So I've inserted one of the songs for you to try out.

I was able to buy this CD on Amazon.com for $7.20 click here

Vivien Schweitzer wrote a review of the CD in last weeks Sunday New York Times:

HILDEGARD VON BINGEN: CELESTIAL HARMONIES

Oxford Camerata; Jeremy Summerly, conductor. Naxos 8.557983; CD.

It is unsurprising that in an increasingly hectic world, where even snatched moments of tranquility are invariably disturbed by cellphone bleeps, the mystically soothing music of Hildegard von Bingen seems eternally popular.

Von Bingen, a 12th-century abbess who was the 10th child of an aristocratic family, boldly founded her own convent at Rupertsberg, where the well-to-do sisters were criticized for their fondness for jewelry and other worldly pleasures. The music of von Bingen, who was also a poet, a playwright, a theologian, an author of treatises on natural history, an adviser to local male luminaries and a visionary (whose hallucinations were probably provoked by migraines), was rediscovered in the early 1980s. Her works have been frequently recorded since, with a spate of recordings in 1998, the 900th anniversary of her birth.

Jeremy Summerly conducts the Oxford Camerata in this new disc, featuring responsories and antiphons from von Bingen’s “Symphony of the Harmony of Heavenly Revelations,” a collection of 77 songs and one music drama completed around 1150.

The eight monophonic selections are set to von Bingen’s colorful texts and addressed to groups and individuals including (among others) the Creator, the Redeemer, the Blessed Virgin Mary, St. John the Evangelist and Martyrs. The excerpts are excellently sung here, with elegantly shaped phrasing and subtly nuanced inflections, by two alternating groups of four women and four men. The contrast between the male and female timbres breaks the occasional monophonic monotony of the plainsong genre.

The singers reflect both the music’s sensuality and its spirituality. The women in particular are notable for their well-blended sound and pure voices, which soar rapturously but with appropriate decorum in the slightly reverberant acoustics of the Chapel of Hertford College, Oxford, where the disc was recorded

I was able to buy this CD on Amazon.com for $7.20 click here

Vivien Schweitzer wrote a review of the CD in last weeks Sunday New York Times:

HILDEGARD VON BINGEN: CELESTIAL HARMONIES

Oxford Camerata; Jeremy Summerly, conductor. Naxos 8.557983; CD.

It is unsurprising that in an increasingly hectic world, where even snatched moments of tranquility are invariably disturbed by cellphone bleeps, the mystically soothing music of Hildegard von Bingen seems eternally popular.

Von Bingen, a 12th-century abbess who was the 10th child of an aristocratic family, boldly founded her own convent at Rupertsberg, where the well-to-do sisters were criticized for their fondness for jewelry and other worldly pleasures. The music of von Bingen, who was also a poet, a playwright, a theologian, an author of treatises on natural history, an adviser to local male luminaries and a visionary (whose hallucinations were probably provoked by migraines), was rediscovered in the early 1980s. Her works have been frequently recorded since, with a spate of recordings in 1998, the 900th anniversary of her birth.

Jeremy Summerly conducts the Oxford Camerata in this new disc, featuring responsories and antiphons from von Bingen’s “Symphony of the Harmony of Heavenly Revelations,” a collection of 77 songs and one music drama completed around 1150.

The eight monophonic selections are set to von Bingen’s colorful texts and addressed to groups and individuals including (among others) the Creator, the Redeemer, the Blessed Virgin Mary, St. John the Evangelist and Martyrs. The excerpts are excellently sung here, with elegantly shaped phrasing and subtly nuanced inflections, by two alternating groups of four women and four men. The contrast between the male and female timbres breaks the occasional monophonic monotony of the plainsong genre.

The singers reflect both the music’s sensuality and its spirituality. The women in particular are notable for their well-blended sound and pure voices, which soar rapturously but with appropriate decorum in the slightly reverberant acoustics of the Chapel of Hertford College, Oxford, where the disc was recorded