cross we bear”), composed about a hundred years earlier. Mixing and matching texts and tunes
(especially new texts and familiar tunes) was a common practice, called contrafactum, that throve
especially in genres that exhibited the kind of rigorous regularity of form and meter that we find in the late
Parisian (or “Victorine”) sequence.
EX. 3-9 Lauda Sion Salvatorem/Laudes crucis attolamusAltogether different were the contemporaneous sequences of Hildegard of Bingen (1098–1179),
Abbess of the Benedictine convent of Rupertsberg in the Rhine valley near the German city of Trier. In its
formal, modal, and metrical clarity, the Parisian sequence accorded with the scholastic tradition of
Augustine and Boethius; scholastic thinkers sought, through orderly and cogent argument, to make faith
intelligible to reason. Hildegard, by contrast, used poetry and music to express a visionary “symphony of
the harmony of heavenly revelations” (symphonia armonie celestium revelationum), as she called her
collected poetical works, assembled by the late 1150s. Besides her famous sequences, the book contains
antiphons, responsories, hymns, and Kyries.
Hildegard’s melodies often have an extraordinary ambitus (up to two and a half octaves!), and they
are not easily parsed into abstract modal functions. Rather, they exhibit the older formula-family notion of
modal identity, just as their verbal patterns, avoiding both rhyme and regular accentuation, revert to the
older, Notker-style notion of prosa. Her fantastic diction and imagery are all her own.
In the sequence Columba aspexit (“The dove looked in”) for the commemoration feast of St.
Maximinus, a local saint of Trier, the versicles are paired in the traditional way, but loosely. (Ex. 3-10
shows the first two pairs.) The members of a pair do not always correspond exactly in syllable count.
Compared with the literal strophic repetition we have become used to in the late medieval sequence,
Hildegard’s melodic parallelism seems more to resemble a process of variation. (Some of her sequences
avoid parallelism altogether, something unheard of since the ninth century and probably unknown to
Hildegard as a precedent.) The result of all these irregularities is a relatively difficult melody to
comprehend rationally or memorize. That lack of easy grasp, which induces a passivity of mind,
combined with a flamboyant imagery, much of it derived from the Song of Songs, that evokes strong