International Music Day 2026 - Four Songs, One Thread
For today's International Music Day, I chose four musical pieces that could hardly be more different:
Carlos Paredes's Verdes Anos, from Paulo Rocha's 1963 film; Paradise Lost's The Last Time from Draconian Times; Ethel Ennis's Dreamer Dreamer from Lullabies for Losers; and Hildegard von Bingen's Ave Generosa.
Hildegard is one of my main inspirations and central to The Polymath from the beginning. Her image is part of its visual identity, her music is part of its atmosphere, and her life embodies something at the heart of what The Polymath is about.
Hildegard lived across music, writing, medicine, natural history, language and visionary thought. She composed, wrote, taught and travelled at a time when the space available to a woman to do such things was very different from what it is now.
Ave Generosa transcends time, place, origin. The music is Medieval, but not remote. It has a strange luminosity, austere and intimate at the same time, and a sense of space that opens, elates.
The Polymath has never been about staying inside one discipline, one period, or one way of thinking. It is about following the connections when they appear.
That is one of the reasons Hildegard remains so important to me.
Sometimes that connection begins with a Portuguese guitar. Or with heavy metal. Or a voice singing an old dream. Or, nine centuries later, Hildegard's songs.
You can read more about my other three musical selections for International Music Day 2026 selection at Mondo Bizarre Magazine.
Happy International Music Day. ✨
More on Hildegard von Bingen at The Polymath – Hildegard von Bingen as a Source of Continuous Inspiration
International Music Day 2025 at The Polymath
International Music Day at Mondo Bizarre Magazine: My Song Choices 2025
[images: Hildegard von Bingen receiving a vision and dictating to Volmar — illumination from the Scivias, c. 1151–1152 | Hildegard von Bingen - Riesencodex (now Wiesbaden, Hochschul- und Landesbibliothek RheinMain, Hs. 2, that contains Hildegard' Symphonia) - Ave Generosa musical manuscripts, c. 1180–1190]
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