9. Celestial Voices.
An early songbook on CD

Medieval music, although so distant from us in time -- it flourished, very roughly speaking, from around 1000 to 1400 AD -- now makes a surprisingly lively impact on people in our advanced industrial technocracies. The furore -- or is it merely a vogue? -- seems to have been unleashed when around ten years ago the group Gothic Voices issued a recording of music by Hildegard of Bingen, the abbess, priestess, poet, composer, philosopher and botanical scientist who, flourishing through a considerable span of the 12th century, is now sometimes referred to as the Earliest Great Composer.

Adventitious circumstances -- her female sex and the multiplicity of her talents -- in part bear on this; though in a general sense the current popularity of medieval music springs from its religious, spiritual, and mystical origins, since our scientific culture grows weary under the burden of so much factual know-how, hoping or even believing that there may be a further dimension to life and death. We don't want unequivocally to know too much, since a sense of wonder is not readily to be forfeited.

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