Ever heard of Hildegard of Bingham? Some 350-odd years before Leonardo da Vinci, this devout German nun (1098-1179) was a bona fide polymath. Admittedly she didn’t invent the helicopter, but she was a composer, writer, philosopher, medic, mystic, founder of German scientific natural history, linguist, dramatist, poet and, posthumously, saint.
She wrote numerous beautiful, freely-composed devotional songs and is often cited as the first identifiable composer in the history of Western music. There now exist hundreds of recordings of her liturgical music but, apparently, the powers that be at classical music bible Gramophone magazine have never heard of her.
