JULY is that rare time of the year when the Song of Solomon — or the Song of Songs — is read or sung in church. It is a love poem, or series of love lyrics, a dialogue between a woman and a man, and popular at weddings. It is also one of the reading choices for the feast of St Mary Magdalene — a human being irresistibly drawn towards Christ — on 22 July.
It should come as no surprise that female composers of sacred music down the ages have been inspired to set texts from the Song of Songs to music. The Song was intended to be sung to music, and — unusually in the Hebrew Scriptures — the female voice is dominant in the text, speaking two-thirds of the lines. From Hildegard of Bingen (c.1098-1179) in medieval times to the early Baroque Italian composer Raffaella Aleotti (c.1570-after 1646), women were inspired by the sensuous beauty of its descriptions and its confident female voice.
Hildegard of Bingen is often described as the queen of female composers. Although she was not the earliest composer, or the earliest female whose music survives (the Eastern Orthodox nun Kassia, c.810-c.65, is earlier), her soaring sacred chants are the most famous and most recorded of any medieval composer, male or female.
In a recent BBC Music Magazine feature on the best 50 classical albums of all time, the album that first brought Hildegard to the modern public’s attention in the 1980s, A Feather on the Breath of God, by Emma Kirkby and Gothic Voices, was the only album on the list featuring music by a female composer: a testament to Hildegard’s ongoing popularity.
“Columba aspexit”, the first track on the album, is one of Hildegard’s best known and most stunning. A musical form known as a sequence — a repeated pattern of pairs of verses chanted after the Alleluia and before the Gospel reading in the mass — this piece celebrates St Maximin of Trier, a fourth-century foe of Arianism and supporter of the Nicene Creed, and the patron saint of a local monastery, for whose monks it may have been written.
Drawing on Song of Songs 2.9, the chant opens with the image of a dove peering in through the leaded lights of a church, as Maximin celebrates mass in the presence of the Holy Spirit. The dove is dazzled by balm radiating from the saint, and the heat of the sun (representing God’s love) pierces the darkness, illuminating Maximin.
Like other texts by Hildegard — such as O Ecclesia, which also features on the album — this chant uses rich imagery, drawing on Old Testament texts relating to worship, but especially on the Song of Songs. St Maximin is likened to a tower made from cedar of Lebanon, recalling Solomon’s temple as well as his bridal chamber (Song of Songs 1.17) that is encrusted with precious stones, and to a swift stag (an image of the Beloved in Song of Songs 2.9) splashing in a fountain running with sweet-smelling spices.
The evocative imagery of mountains and valleys, sweet-smelling spices and perfume (symbolising Divine Grace), all combine in this sensuous celebration of the priesthood and the beauty of holiness, until finally Hildegard addresses Maximin himself. A spiritual force, shimmering at the altar, he rises like incense (Song of Songs 3.6) to the pillar of the people’s praise, interceding for them as they reach in praise towards a mirror of light.
The plainchant carries the words, and the song moves from something earthly to become something transcendental, as the single thread of melody weaves its way into the acoustic of the church and soars, as if elevating our prayer to God and achieving mystical and spiritual union with God — a kind of wordless union with God and form of prayer.
Hildegard was an abbess, and for her and her nuns, chant was a vehicle for prayer. The physical descriptions of “Columba aspexit” lift us up and draw us closer to the spiritual love of God in prayer, as the chant is sung slowly enough and memorised over a lifetime within the community to enable simultaneous contemplation of its meaning.
In a letter to the prelates of Mainz after her nuns were banned from singing the liturgy, she explains the central importance of music and praise and the part played by the embodied human within this: “The body is the vestment of the spirit, which has a living voice, and so it is proper for the body, in harmony with the soul, to use its voice to sing praises to God”.
Many of Hildegard’s chants are for feasts of female saints, such as the Rhineland saint Ursula, or, importantly, the Virgin Mary. Historically, the Song of Songs was important in the Church calendar, not because of its literal meaning as a lush and sensuous love poem between a man and a woman, but because it symbolised the spiritual love relationship that exists between God, or Christ (gendered male), and his Church (gendered female).
AS MEDIEVAL plainchant developed into polyphony (music that combines a number of parts, each forming an individual melody and harmonising with one another), texts from the Song of Songs were often set for feast days of the Blessed Virgin Mary, because Mary, in the Catholic Church of the time, was viewed as the real and mystical bride of Christ, or as representing the Christian soul.
It is thought that the tiny, jewel-like motet “Sicut lilium inter spinas” (“As a lily among brambles, so is my love among maidens”, Song of Songs 2.2 ), written for five female voices and discovered in an anonymous 1543 collection, was composed by the nun and abbess Leonora D’Este (1515-1575), probably for vespers on the feast of the Immaculate Conception of the Virgin Mary.
D’Este was a princess, and from a wealthy family in the northern Italian city of Ferrara. Her mother, the notorious Lucrezia Borgia, a powerful noblewoman and one of the Renaissance’s most notorious femme fatales, died when D’Este was four, which is when she entered the convent. It may be that she chose to become a nun rather than get married and have children, because it meant that she could do the things she most wanted to do — play and study music — without the distraction of childbearing or politics.
D’Este had her own organ in her apartments at her convent, as well as responsibility for the organ in the inner choir of the convent church. She was a respected musical intellectual, corresponding with other highly respected male musicians of the time. Her composition “Sicut lilium” has been recorded by the contemporary American female vocal group Lyyra. It has an intimate, dreamlike quality, as the five female voices weave hypnotically around each other in close harmony, pulling the listener in, with constant echoing between the parts.
This reflects the dreamlike quality of the individual poem-texts that make up the Song of Solomon, most of them delivered through the intimate poetic convention of an “I” — a first-person voice that can be male or female, but in this instance is female.
The Song of Songs may have appealed to female composer-nuns such as D’Este, not just because of its association with the Virgin Mary, but because of its strong focus on the woman’s point of view. In the secular courtly love-poetry of the time which was being set to music, the woman was the silent object, and the man the speaking subject.
Yet, as the musicologist Laurie Stras who discovered D’Este’s music has argued, texts such as the Song of Songs allowed women, or those who were nuns, at least, to speak and sing in their own voice, a specifically female voice, expressing their physical and spiritual desires directly in a way that would not otherwise have been possible.
MUSIC in convents across Ferrara continued to flourish as the 16th century continued. It was of an exceptionally high standard, accessible daily to ordinary citizens who listened to the nuns singing in the external church attached to every convent chapel through the grilles and windows that broke the separation between the inner and outer portions of the church.
Far from a threat coming into the convent from the secular outside, music was a way that the sacred could exit the convent and influence the outside, as the nuns used it to communicate God’s love.
The late-Renaissance child prodigy and eventually abbess Raffaella Aleotti, whose 1593 collection of sacred motets is the earliest book of sacred compositions we know of to be credited in print to a woman, looks both back and forwards in time, reaching towards the new Baroque style. In her motets, written, unlike D’Este’s, for both upper- and lower-voice parts, the lower, men’s voices were replaced with instruments played by the nuns.
In her “Ego flos campi” (“As a lily among brambles”, Song of Songs 2.2), Aleotti includes more of the verses from the Song of Songs spoken by the female than does the earlier, well-known setting of the same name by Clemens non Papa, moving away from a simple description of a female lover through natural similes and metaphors to the first person.
Her rousing setting “Surge, propera amica” uses ascending scales and rising key changes to convey the poetic idea of “Arise, my love, my fair one” (Song of Songs 2.13), encouraging the soul to rise in its spiritual quest and be united with God in joyful prayer.
Hildegard, D’Este, and Aleotti all related to male composers of their time, while being distinctive. Whether any female composers of sacred music were aware of others, they are connected by their tendency to choose biblical texts that privilege women’s perspectives or women’s experience.
Scripture forbade women to speak in church, but, to some extent, legitimised female singing and music-making through texts such as the Song of Songs, and biblical role-models such as female prophets who sang, and the Virgin Mary. In a time before Romantic ideas of perfection and genius worked to exclude women from composing music, female monastic communities provided the skills and opportunity for women to express their spiritual longing through composing beautiful liturgical music to the glory of God.
Canon Anna Macham is Precentor of Salisbury Cathedral.
