ABSTRACT
Timothy McGee, who has worked for decades on early music and performance practice issues as both a scholar and an active music director, reminds that there doubtless was much variation in the way early music was originally performed. The most extreme example can be found in the 30-plus recordings of the music of Hildegard of Bingen currently available. Although many accounts in French and German appeared in the late nineteenth century, descriptions of Hildegard’s music in English really began in the 1980s after recordings started to appear in earnest, most notably after Gothic Voices produced A Feather on the Breath of God. To understand the impact of Gothic Voices’ 1981 recording, it would be useful to review the treatment of Hildegard’s music in earlier recordings. Gothic Voices brought to their recording of Hildegard professional singers, expertise in the performance of early music, and the reputations of both the singers and their director, Christopher Page.
