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It may seem odd to call the medieval mystic Hildegard von Bingen a Renaissance woman, though the description certainly fits. Hildegard (1098-1179) was the abbess of a convent on the bank of the Rhine River in Germany. She wrote religious poems, plays, and treatises on theology, natural history, and medicine. She corresponded with Popes, emperors, and powerful clerics. She was also a composer of remarkable originality whose ecstatic, swooping chants are unlike any other music written in that time. Sequentia, an eminent early music ensemble, has a passion for Hildegard's music; they've undertaken the first complete recording of her work, of which Cantacles of Ecstasy was the third installment. Sung as they might have been in Hildegard's convent, accompanied by the simple drone of a fiddle, and the ethereal pluck of a medieval harp, these rapturous performances evoke the exotic atmosphere of a distant era.
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