Paul Novak - hildegard dreams of a garden (2025) for orchestra

hildegard dreams of a garden (2025) for orchestra

St. Hildegard of Bingen – the 12th century abbess, writer, composer, and mystic – spent much of her life in her monastery’s herbal garden. She wrote several volumes on botany and natural medicine, and her understanding of the natural world was deeply linked with her spiritual practice and visions. In this work, I imagine the orchestra as a garden, blooming from a solo viola into a colorful ecosystem teeming with life. It is orchestrated to suggest the reverberance of a single voice in a cathedral, singing in the floridly ornamented style characteristic of Hildegard. The seed of the piece from which the piece sprouts is the first two phrases of Hildegard’s antiphon O rubor sanguinis for St. Ursula: “O bloody red/that flowed from the height/divinity has touched: you are a flower/that the wintry breath of the serpent/has never touched.”

hildegard dreams of a garden was commissioned by the Orchestra of St. Luke's as a part of the 2025 DeGaetano Composition Institute.

Performed by Westside Chamber Players, conducted by Sofia Ouyang