MELZITA by Rocky Duval, Andrea Roberts, Hildegard von Bingen

MELZITA is a new take on Hildegard von Bingen’s music and her secret language, Lingua Ignota, by award winning mezzo-soprano Rocky Duval and Grammy nominated engineer/producer Andrea Roberts. The album has seven tracks, three of which are Hildegard’s compositions, four of which are Rocky Duval’s compositions written in Hildegard’s secret 12th Century language.

Duval and Roberts, friends since childhood, wanted to make a piece of art together that would take the listener on a journey from very old to very new sounds. Some tracks use only voices or violin to create a drone bed for the medieval chants, while others use modern production elements.

While Hildegard’s music has been explored in many ways over the recent decades (from the hyper traditional Sequentia to the hyper silly Hildegard von Blingen), this album seeks to form a bridge between the modern aesthetics of contemporary sound design and the 12th century compositions of one of the foremothers of western classical music. Additionally, while Hildegard’s secret language, Lingua Ignota has been explored by linguists and historical language scholars, very little work has been done to actually use these invented words

With this in mind, Rocky Duval took the list of nearly 1100 words and created four poems out of them: Aieganz (Angels), O Liuionz (O Savior), Cauiz, Harizima, Ziuienz (Crickets, Saints of the Fields), and Ispariz (Spirit). She then took these poems and wrote four compositions. O Liuionz is a pastiche of Hildegard’s compositional style, while the other three veer into a more modern folk or contemporary choral style, again, forming a bridge between then and now.

The title, MELZITA means “honey” in Lingua Ignota. An homage to Hilegard’s work as a naturalist healer, and a reminder to the artists to choose softness and sweetness in every choice on the album.

Rocky Duval is a classical singer, performance poet, and creator of shows. She sings weird new music and beautiful old music.