Sequences

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The Sequence as Liturgical Narrative Form

Hildegard of Bingen’s liturgical songs—especially her sequences preserved in the Symphonia armonie celestium revelationum—occupy an increasingly secure place in both musicology and medieval studies. [1] Yet their significance extends beyond questions of modal structure, authorship, or visionary theology. When approached through feminist theories of voice, narration, and embodiment, Hildegard’s sequences emerge as crucial early moments in a longer genealogy of women composers in Western music: they are not simply devotional chants; they are instances in which a woman composes theology into sound, inserts female authorship into liturgical temporality, and transforms vision into collective vocal practice.

The medieval sequence, originally derived from the jubilus of the Alleluia, developed into a genre capable of theological elaboration within the Mass. David Healey has argued that its origins are disputed, (1993, 152) but by the twelfth century, it functioned as a heightened poetic and musical commentary on feasts and saints. [2] Hildegard adopts this liturgical form but reshapes it through unusually expansive melodic ranges, asymmetrical phrasing, and dense symbolic language. [3]

Embodiment, Cosmology, and Narrative Imagination

Hildegard’s sequences are marked by cosmological amplitude. Creation, incarnation, and redemption unfold through images of light, greening vitality, maternal fecundity, and celestial harmony. This cosmology is not abstract speculation; it is sensorial and embodied. Caroline Walker Bynum’s work on medieval women’s spirituality (1982) has shown how theological reflection was often articulated through bodily metaphors and maternal imagery. Hildegard extends this into sound. Her melodic lines—frequently spanning wide intervals and resisting quick cadential closure—generate an acoustic experience of elevation and suspension. The body of the singer participates in theological ascent.

Here music functions as narrative embodiment. It does not merely describe divine fecundity; it enacts it through breath and resonance. Theologically charged imagery and melodic expansiveness converge, producing what we might call an ecological temporality—time experienced as growth, unfolding, renewal.

Within a feminist framework, this convergence is crucial. It demonstrates that women were not confined to devotional passivity but engaged in conceptual, aesthetic, and compositional labor of considerable sophistication.

Vision, Authorization, and the Feminine Voice

Hildegard’s prose works frame her authority through visionary compulsion: she writes what she “sees and hears,” under divine command (Flanagan 1989; Newman 1987). This visionary mediation has frequently been interpreted as a strategy of authorization within male ecclesiastical structures. By grounding speech in divine revelation, Hildegard displaces suspicion from her female body to God’s initiative.

From a feminist perspective, however, the sequences mark a further step. They do not simply report vision; they transpose it. Vision becomes melody. Private revelation becomes communal chant. Adriana Cavarero’s philosophy of vocal expression is particularly illuminating here. For Cavarero (2005), voice is irreducibly relational and embodied; it precedes semantic abstraction and exposes the uniqueness of the speaking subject. Hildegard’s sequences complicate this dynamic. On the one hand, they originate in a singular visionary body. On the other, they are designed to be sung by a community of women. The singular voice is redistributed across multiple throats. Authority is not dissolved but acoustically shared.

In this sense, Hildegard’s sequences enact what might be called a politics of vocal transmission. Female authorship does not remain confined to silent script. It enters the liturgy—one of the most powerful narrative structures of the medieval world—and resonates there.

Liturgical Time and Feminist Histories of Composition

To situate Hildegard within a feminist genealogy of women composers requires attention to temporality. Medieval liturgy organized sacred time: days, seasons, feasts, commemorations. To compose a sequence was to intervene in this temporal architecture. Hildegard’s communities at Rupertsberg and Eibingen sang her music within the Mass and Office. Through repetition, her theological imagination became embedded in the cyclical return of liturgical celebration. Female authorship was not episodic; it was recurrent.

This has significant implications for a feminist history of composition. Too often, women composers are narrated as isolated exceptions breaking into public space. Hildegard’s case demonstrates a different configuration. She composed from within institutional Christianity, not outside it. Her creativity was neither purely oppositional nor purely derivative; it operated through monastic structures, liturgical frameworks, and theological traditions.

Such a configuration complicates modern narratives of artistic autonomy. Medieval authorship—particularly for women—was relational, communal, and institutionally entangled. Rather than framing Hildegard as a singular anomaly, a feminist genealogical approach situates her as one node within a deeper intertwined reality of women shaping musical and theological culture.

Beyond Singular Genius: Sounding a Feminist Genealogy

Modern reception has tended to canonize Hildegard as a unique medieval female genius. While this recovery has been invaluable, it risks reinforcing the very exceptionalism that feminist historiography seeks to undo. Hildegard was indeed remarkable—but she was also deeply embedded in twelfth-century intellectual, musical, and liturgical cultures (Fassler 1998; McGinn 1998).

A genealogical approach asks different questions:

How did her compositions circulate within female monastic networks?
How did liturgical repetition sustain female-authored theology?
What configurations of institutional belonging enabled such creativity?

Seen in this light, Hildegard’s sequences are not anomalies but early attestations of a long, complex history in which women have shaped the sounding forms of religious and artistic life. Hildegard’s sequences allow us to hear a medieval woman composing theology into rhythm and melody, inscribing her imagination into communal practice, and intervening in the temporal structures of worship. They challenge modern assumptions about authorship, creativity, and institutional constraint. They remind us that women’s compositional labor has often been embedded in collective practices rather than isolated public performance.

To write a feminist genealogy of women composers in classical music is therefore not only to recover forgotten names. It is to trace how women have shaped memory, ritual, pedagogy, and sound itself across centuries. Hildegard’s sequences stand at an early and resonant point in this genealogy—where vision becomes voice, voice becomes chant, and chant becomes enduring communal time.

Notes

[1] For a critical edited collection of Hildegard's Symphonia, see Newman 1998.

[2] For a lucid exposition and historical overview of sequences within the chant genres, see Hiley (1993), II.22, pp. 172–198.

[3] For rich discussions of Hildegard's Sequences, see amongst others, Dronke 1984, Fassler 1998, Newman 1998, Gardiner 2019.

References

Bynum, Caroline Walker. Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982.

Cavarero, Adriana. For More Than One Voice: Toward a Philosophy of Vocal Expression. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005.

Davidson, Audrey Ekdahl. Ed. The Ordo Virtutum of Hildegard of Bingen: Critical Studies. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 1992.

Dronke, Peter. "Hildegard von Bingen." In Women Writers of the Middles Ages: A Critical Study of Texts fro Perpetua to Marguerite Porete. Cambridge University Press. 1984.

Fassler, Margot E. “Composer and Dramatist: ‘Melodious Singing and the Freshness of Remorse.’” In Voice of the Living Light: Hildegard of Bingen and Her World, ed. Barbara Newman, 149-175. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998.

Flanagan, Sabina. Hildegard of Bingen: A Visionary Life. London: Routledge, 1989.

Gardiner, Michael. Hildegard von Bingen's Ordo Virtutum: A Musical and Metaphysical Analysis. London: Routledge, 2019.

Hildegard of Bingen. Symphonia: a Critical Edition of the Symphonia Armonie Celestium Revelationum [symphony of the Harmony of Celestial Revelations]. ed. and trans. Barbara Newman. 2nd ed. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998.

Hiley, David. Western Plainchant: A Handbook. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.

Newman, Barbara. Sister of Wisdom: St. Hildegard’s Theology of the Feminine. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987.

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