Description:
Laura Cannell – The Rituals of Hildegard Reimagined (2024)
Review:
A spiritual sequel to 2022’s brilliant Antiphony of the Trees, Laura Cannell‘s latest album is dedicated the music and influence of 12th century composer, nun and mystic Hildegard von Bingen – reinterpretations and fresh compositions performed on bass recorders and a 12-string knee harp. In the late ’90s when she was a young student, Cannell reconnected with an uncle who was fascinated by early music. He played her Sequentia’s Canticles of Ecstasy, an album of vocal music written by Hildegard that immediately lodged itself in Cannell’s brain. She admits that she’s been “borrowing” from that music ever since, and Hildegard has become a comfort blanket of sorts, helping her to overcome stress during her most trying times. ‘The Rituals of Hildegard Reimagined’ is Cannell’s attempt to not only process anxiety but to transport Hildegard’s music and its spirit into a new setting, using her own ideas contemporary minimalist techniques to reconstruct a picture that’s more than a mere reverie. Cannell improvised the album earlier this year in Norfolk where she grew up, at St Andrew’s Church – the location that she recorded her debut solo album ‘Sparrows Over the Black Earth’ over a decade ago. Although it’s a mixture of original work and selected pieces from Hildegard’s songbook, it sounds like a continuous thought. Opening track ‘The Cosmic Spheres of Being Human’ directly references Hildegard’s ‘Book of Divine Works’, and swirl of echo-laced recorder breaths might be aesthetically modern, but contain unmistakable traces of Hildegard’s early sacred music. Similarly, ‘See the Moon and the Stars’ takes its title from a well-known verse (“Glance at the sun / See the moon and the stars / Gaze at the beauty of earth’s greenings”) and interrupts its divine early music-inspired recorder patterns with percussive key presses and haunted reverberations that seem to rumble through the church. The palette is switched up on ‘Earthly Music’, when Cannell uses an untempered 12-string knee harp to offset the recorders’ fixed pitch and cunningly shuttle our minds backwards before launching into her first Hildegard reinterpretation. ‘O Ignee Spiritus’ was written as a choral piece, and Cannell’s version – played on recorder – lends roots to her previous originals. We can hear not only the melodic basis for the tracks, but how her use of layering and delay effects are able to swell her performance as she replaces the singer. She’s even bolder on the title track, overblowing her instrument to generate unsettling dissonant wails that give an eerie rhythmic quiver to Cannell’s rounded, celestial tones. It feels almost disrespectful to call this music meditative, but there’s a cadence that feels ancestrally lulling, as if you’re being beckoned by benevolent ghosts and soothed into a deep dreamless sleep. Reworking one of Hildegard’s hymns into a muted woodwind lament, Cannell makes her bass recorder sing in low murmurs on ‘O Mater Omnis Gaudii’, combining the scratchy breaths with piercing, staccato plucks on ‘A Feather on the Breath. Really, it’s an album that has to be absorbed in its entirety, ideally while poring over Hildegard’s fascinating 12th century texts. — boomkat.com
Track List:
01 - The Cosmic Spheres of Being Human
02 - See the Moon and the Stars
03 - Earthly Music
04 - O Ignee Spiritus
05 - The Rituals of Hildegard
06 - Flying North
07 - O Mater Omnis Gaudii
08 - A Feather on the Breath
09 - Ad Celestum Armoniam
10 - Everything is Hidden in You
11 - Remain Brave in a World that is being Shipwrecked
12 - A Lost Nightingale
Media Report:
Genre: alternative folk, classical, experimental
Origin: UK 
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits
Compression mode: Lossless
Writing library: libFLAC 1.2.1 (UTC 2007-09-17)
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