Hildegard’s Cosmos and Its Music: Making a Digital Model for the Modern Planetarium

Hildegard’s Cosmos and Its Music: Making a Digital Model for the Modern Planetarium

Lecture by Margot Fassler

Given at the American Musicological Society Annual Meeting in Milwaukee, on November 6, 2014

Margot Fassler, Keough-Hesburgh Professor of Music History and Liturgy at the University of Notre Dame, presented this talk, entitled “Hildegard’s Cosmos and Its Music: Making a Digital Model for the Modern Planetarium.” The work reported on in this talk is a collaborative effort involving forces performative, scholarly, and technological. Because of the way Hildegard describes her understanding of the cosmos in the treatise Scivias, the model unfolds in two acts. The First Act allows for the events that occur before the universe as she depicts it was set in motion with all its epic struggles, and the Second Act places the Cosmic Egg in motion, with zoomable features. To do this work, the creators have transformed flat illuminations into moving, sounding three-dimensional images, following Hildegard’s instructions for how they work as faithfully as possible. It is as though a twelfth-century composer wrote a storyboard for us to follow, lacking the technology herself.