This online recital was recorded and presented by Phoenix Central Park as part of their Behind Doors series of filmed concerts made in 2020.
2:06 O ignee Spiritus (12th century) Hildegard von Bingen
6:03 Wespe (2005) Enno Poppe
13:42 Je brûle, dit-elle un jour à un camarade (1990) Philippe Leroux
'I am burning,' she said one day to her friend. This is the title of the Philippe Leroux work that comes last in this short program for unaccompanied voice. The image of the body and mind aflame is what ties the program’s three works together. In the first, the opening of Hildegard von Bingen’s 'O Ignee Spiritus', from the 12th century, we experience the religious soul ablaze; in the second, Enno Poppe’s 2005 work 'Wespe,' whose refrain is 'wasp come into my mouth,' the flame sits on the tongue, itching for language; and in Leroux’s 'Je brule, dit-elle un jour a un camarade' ('I am burning,' she said one day to her friend), the text opens with a frantic and passionate plea for recognition from the object of one’s love. In addition to the ongoing presence of flame in the program, the works make explicit, each in their own way, the project of using musical gesture to adorn and embellish language. In music, melisma is the term that describes singing a series of pitches for each syllable of the text. Hildegard von Bingen’s music is appreciated for its elaborate use of melisma. 'O Ignee Spiritus' is very spare, very unadorned, given some of Hildegard’s other music. But it has been chosen in part because from that starting place of relative sparseness, the musical adornment of language grows through the program. In 'Wespe', the melisma comes in a fragmented form, with each syllable distributed across many buzzing, insistent, repetitive short phrases, the wasp of the title a troubling and irritating muse for language. And in the final piece, Leroux uses a notational system related to Hildegard’s to notate very elaborate melisma, inspired by synagogical music, in which, he says, 'there is an essential relationship between word, sound, and gesture.'