ABSTRACT
Chapter 2 continues to develop relations between folding, immanence, and transformation in Hildegard’s writing as a means of activating a speculative and perceptual insight into the divine mysteries by drawing comparisons between her visionary geometries as they appear in Scivias and the tetrachordal mixtures that arise in the music. The chapter comes to focus specifically upon the image of the cloud, which appears in the first line of text of the Ordo, as an emblem of such transformations. The chapter then shifts focus and considers how all of the metaphysical transformations detailed in Chapter 1 might relate to a musical theory of medieval mode when looked at through the lens of “transformational theory” and a “generalized interval system” (GIS). Then a sample analysis of the third piece of the Ordo is undertaken to familiarize readers with the type of “nodal” analysis that will appear throughout the remainder of the book.
