Anonymous
Music peaked with Hildegard vo(...) 05/14/26(Thu)00:53:45 No.130294415

File: St-Hildegard.jpg (64 KB, 300x439)

64 KB JPG

Music peaked with Hildegard von Bingen. Anonymous 05/14/26(Thu)00:53:45 No.130294415

Of Medieval music, her work is in a league of its own. Before minor and major scale, musicians created rooms for you to inhabit. These rooms were sublime -- in Hildegard's case literally divinely inspired -- and did not try to earn or appeal to your emotion. But they still evoked deep, heart-wrenching response regardless.

These spaces; these sacred realms of sound unfold and ebb and flow in ways that even later Renaissance era music started to drift away from as polyphony and counter-melody entered into the once extremely pure sounds. Yes, this would eventually lead to The Beatles, but at what price?

Hildegard's small but powerful catalog of music actually sounds like a living heaven. Her music does not demand, yet it also does not shy-away. She made musical soundscapes that said so much without you ever understanding a word. There was no trying -- it is the opposite of try-hard.

All music since has largely been exactly that -- trying to impress you with sound. The purity of this music from the 1100s was just enough of a step above traditional gregorian chant to differentiate itself and suggest something fresh -- but still grounded in such a simplicity that literally all music since has abandoned in every way.

To say 'music peaked in 1100' might seem a little troll-y, but there is truth to it -- there never has been and never will be again the simple combination of everything that made Hildegard von Bingen's music so powerful. Just before modern music's true beginning of the beginning, but long-after centuries and thousands of years of foundation in sound.

The goal was to connect you with something higher in the most pure, sincere way imaginable. To call your attention upwards. After all this time, nothing else has ever been as powerful in all of recorded music history. Music peaked with Hildegard von Bingen in the 1100s.