ORDO VIRTUTUM – Jeff Bird plays Hildegard von Bingen: volume two
Jeff Bird
Independent 2025UTUM (jeffbird.bandcamp.com/album/ordo-virtutum-jeff-bird-plays-hildegard-von-bingen-volume-two)
A few years ago, Guelph area musician Jeff Bird produced a unique recording featuring what he called adaptations of the music of Hildegard of Bingen. He has now followed up with a further collection of pieces inspired by and adapted from this 12th century German abbess, who must stand out as one of the most remarkable individuals of that mediaeval period. Hildegard produced melodies for her nuns to sing communally [as monks did with Gregorian Plainchant], and inscribed these musical lines in illustrated manuscripts, designed with colours and ornaments, which are beautiful in themselves.
As with Bird’s first collection, the chant has been compressed to produce a faster moving melody line, which follows the intervals of the chant more quickly and renders them instrumentally in arrangements that are based on a main voice usually played on a harmonica. There is no singing.
There are eight separate numbers, and each features a very precise scoring of the solo harmonica line, recorded and performed meticulously with a limited vibrato, plus another instrumental line which varies from number to number, and forms organum and pedal effects and echoes surrounding the main melody, with strings in the first, trumpet in the third, and we hear sections with electric guitar, sruti-box, [tiny] pipe organ and even a harp, but all in contemplative flowing, very simple and clear lines.
The intense meditational focus eventually creates an obsessive, mesmerizing quality, but each of the numbers ends abruptly, usually fading back before the next piece without any cadential process. This disc could be an effective background of calming music played on repeat. The single sleeved album has a minimum of notes, but is very elaborately decorated, as is the CD itself.
