Sacred harp music for St Caimin’s Mountshannon

MOUNTSHANNON Arts will to host a Harp Concert with a difference this Saturday October 22 when Erin Durrett and Christina Tourin join together to present ‘Songs of Hildegard and the Early Saints’ with Blossom Harps and guest harpers from America.

Internationally renowned harp educator, Christina Tourin is one of the most accomplished harpists of her generation, delighting audiences with her performances worldwide. Soprano Erin Durrett, who loves music of all times, genres, and cultures, has a special passion for scared chant and is Director of Music Ministries at The Episcopal Church of the Holy Spirit on Vashon Island. 

Blossom Harps is directed by Lizzie Affolter who initiated the Blossom Harp Festival in Tuamgraney in 2016. The hugely popular event has since become renamed the Tuamgraney Harp Festival.

Hildegard of Bingen was a saint, composer and poet and it’s only recently that her songs, writings and remarkable life and visions have been rediscovered. She was born over 900 years ago and for most of her 80-plus years was shut away in an obscure hilltop monastery in the Rhineland.

This remarkable woman had left behind a treasure-trove of illuminated manuscripts, scholarly writings and songs written for her nuns to sing at their devotions. 

Interest in Hildegard started to grow around the 800th anniversary of her death in 1979, when Philip Pickett and his New London Consort gave possibly the first performances of four of Hildegard’s songs. In 1983, the success of A Feather On The Breath Of God, an album of her music, piqued people’s curiosity about the author of these sensual, vivid, lyrical songs.

Now there are hundreds of recordings of Hildegard’s music, numerous biographies, and even some novels, popular histories, documentaries and websites hailing her as an early feminist and New Age guru.

Accounts written in Hildegard’s lifetime, and just after, describe an extraordinarily accomplished woman. She is described as a visionary and a prophet, and was known as ‘The Sibyl Of The Rhine’. Hildegard was a pioneer who wrote practical books on biology, botany, medicine, theology and the arts.

She was a prolific letter-writer to everyone from humble penitents looking for a cure for infertility to popes, emperors and kings seeking spiritual or political advice.

Hildegard’s music will be heard in the surroundings of St Caimin’s Church Of Ireland in Mountshannon. Tickets are available online for €10 at Mountshannonarts.ie.