To the Catholic Church she is St. Hildegard, venerated by a special liturgy on September 17. To musicians she is the first great woman composer. Five hundred years after Gregory I, the first compiler of Gregorian chants, Hildegard composed plainchant melodies in her own highly individual style, to go with poems that she wrote for special services at the convent of Bingen, in western Germany, under her charge as abbess. She also wrote a famous book describing her religious visions, books on natural science and medicine, even biographies.

“Columba aspexit” was composed in honor of a now-forgotten saint, St. Maximinus. It belongs to a late medieval plainchant genre called the sequence, a much more elaborate kind of melody than the antiphon, consisting of a series of short tunes sung twice, with some variation: A A′ B B′ C C′ . . . N. A soloist sings A, the choir A′, and so on. Modal cadences — Mixolydian, once again — at the beginning of the melody (“fenestrae,” “eius”) give it a deceptively humble quality that contrasts with its ecstatic soaring later. Like “In paradisum,” “Columba aspexit” grows more and more melismatic — that is, it shows more melismas — as it goes along.

Our recording includes an instrumental drone — a single two-note chord running continuously. Drones are known from music around the world as well as from European folk music, and there is evidence that drones were sometimes used to accompany plainchant. The drone, the mystical words of Hildegard’s poem, and the free, surging melody work together to produce a feeling of serene yet intense spirituality.