Alkemie: “Verdant Medicine” - Hildegard’s Resonant Apothecary

In the words of Hildegard "the senses are to a person as precious stones sealed in a vase.” Deepen your experience with a concert you can not only hear and see-but also touch, smell, and taste! VERDANT MEDICINE celebrates mystic, medic, and musician Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179), a medieval polymath who expanded both Christian theology and the humoral theory of Galen to connect the viriditas (living greenness) of plants and the metaphorical viridity of spirituality directly to the human body and its functioning. Her beliefs are mirrored in the music she wrote for her nuns-ecstatic chants in which unfurling branches, earthbound roots, and medicinal spices are depicted in soaring melodies that swirl throughout an almost three-octave range.This multi-media experience expands upon Hildegard’s music with quotes from her mystical and medical writings paired with projections of images, accompanying fixed media, and materials distributed to the audience that evoke the five senses.
Alkemie delights in exploring and celebrating the vibrant and timeless sounds of the past. As travelers to the intersections of medieval court, cloister, and folk music, and we are fervently committed to dismantling the barriers that have traditionally separated these domains and our present experience. Comprised of singer-performers playing two dozen instruments-including vielles (early fiddles), harps, psaltery, scheitholt (early zither), recorders, douçaines & dulcians (early double reeds), bagpipes, and percussion-Alkemie is known for its “characterful playing” (The New Yorker) and “superb ensemble skills” (Limelight); our performance at the Indianapolis Early Music Festival was lauded as “indicating [the] future health of the field of early music.”
Founded in 2013, Alkemie calls Brooklyn home, but our music knows no bounds. In addition to our New York City concerts, we’ve had the privilege of performing on series including the Amherst Early Music Festival, Arizona Early Music Society, Cambridge Society for Early Music, Capitol Early Music Series, Five Boroughs Music Festival, Johns Hopkins Program in Arts, Humanities & Health, Music Before 1800, and the European Early Music Network’s virtual Early Music Day festival. In 2024 we made our debut at the Berkeley Early Music Festival with Chanticleer, and collaborated with Amanda Gookin’s Forward Music Project to commission and debut 11 new works by women and non-binary composers.
Equally passionate about recording, we curated, composed, and recorded music for the Peabody and BAFTA award-winning video game Pentiment, and released multiple new albums in the 2023-24 season, including “A Fine Companion,” a dream-pop/shoegaze/psychedelic rock album of troubadour songs that “skillfully transforms troubadour texts into dreamily contemporary journeys,” and “Love to My Liking” which “teem[s] with a rustic, down-home swagger” (Early Music America). Both albums are on the Bright Shiny Things label. (alkemie.org)
Live from St. Paul’s Chapel, Columbia University.