[+] Colton, Lisa. “Past Tense: Creative Medievalism in the Music of Margaret Lucy Wilkins.” In The Oxford Handbook of Music and Medievalism, edited by Stephen C. Meyer and Kirsten Yri, 301-26. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020.
British composer Margaret Lucy Wilkins regularly engages with medievalism, specifically pertaining to the Gothic, employed within her decidedly modern aesthetic. John Ruskin defines the Gothic in architecture as the individualistic, spiritually uplifting quality of spaces created by skilled craftsmen, an idea that became central to the nineteenth-century Gothic revival. Wilkins evokes a Gothic approach to space in compositions such as Musica Angelorum (1991), which specifies a particular spatial arrangement of instruments. Revelations of the Seven Angels (1988) demonstrates other approaches to creative medievalism with its borrowing of medieval plainchant and motet melodies found in the volume Historical Anthology of Music. As in medieval polyphony, the borrowed chant tunes function as the structural foundation for Revelations. Wilkins also explores the spiritual and primitive perceptions of medievalism in a similar way to Gothic signifiers in horror film soundtracks. Beyond borrowing medieval musical material, Wilkins draws on the Gothic fascination with numerology, with 49 (7 times 7) Alleluias appearing in the finale. Wilkins’s music demonstrates a level of historical fantasy necessary for creative medievalism. A critical understanding of creative medievalism requires a consideration of both the imagined past and the historical past.
Works: Margaret Lucy Wilkins: Struwwelpeter (306), Revelations of the Seven Angels (312-19).
Sources: Offenbach: Tales of Hoffman (306); Plainchant: Benedicamus Domino (314-19); Anonymous: Candida virginitas/T. Flos filius (314-19).
Index Classifications: 1900s
Contributed by: Matthew Van Vleet
