SAN FRANCISCO — IF YOU'VE ever struggled to learn a poem or piece of music by heart, you may have been abashed at the effort required. But consider how much worse you would have felt in medieval Europe.
"Medieval people reserved their awe for memory," New York University professor Mary Carruthers writes in "The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture." "Their greatest geniuses they describe as people of superior memories, they boast unashamedly of their prowess in that faculty, and they regard it as a mark of superior moral character as well as intellect."
What's more, the scarcity of books in the Middle Ages meant that the vast majority of information was exchanged aurally -- and that included musical knowledge. "Learning by ear was the only way music was absorbed, since manuscripts were never used as scores in the sense that we understand," says Benjamin Bagby, director of the Paris-based early music ensemble Sequentia.
A millennium later, such feats of recall can seem well nigh miraculous, or so I've concluded this summer. As a member of the a cappella group the San Francisco Renaissance Voices, I've spent more hours than I care to count learning and memorizing the part of the Soul in "Ordo Virtutum" (Order of the Virtues), a musical morality play composed around 1150 by the visionary German abbess, scientist, poet, musician and mystic Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179).
Hildegard's composition, which our group is presenting in a series of concerts this month, may have topped the monastic Billboard charts back in the 12th century. But to a classically trained singer weaned on Mozart, Morrissey and Madonna (in other words, music in recognizable keys, with hummable melodies and conventional time signatures), this archaic "opera" concerning the Soul's journey from temptation to salvation initially seemed to be the opposite of catchy.
The mere prospect of getting the random, meandering sequences of notes and impenetrable Latin lyrics down was daunting enough. But committing the stuff to memory, as our music director, Todd Jolly, had instructed us to do to create a freer interpretation, seemed about as likely as the composer's strapping on her wimple and putting in an appearance on our opening night.
First there was the issue of language. Although many singers in the U.S. are familiar with pronouncing standard church Latin, the medieval German that Hildegard used followed different rules. It took weeks for us to substitute the "kwids" and "kwods" that had been hard-wired into our brains from singing innumerable masses by Tallis and Byrd for more Germanic-sounding "kvids" and "kvods."
