Rants From The Rookery: Unlocking ancient music

Tuesday, May 01, 2007

Unlocking ancient music

From carvings:

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LONDON (Reuters) - A Scottish church which featured in the best-selling novel "The Da Vinci Code" has revealed another mystery hidden in secret code for almost 600 years.

A father and son who became fascinated by symbols carved into the chapel's arches say they have deciphered a musical score encrypted in them.

Thomas Mitchell, a 75-year-old musician and ex-Royal Air Force code breaker, and his composer and pianist son Stuart, described the piece as "frozen music."

"The music has been frozen in time by symbolism," Mitchell said on his Web site (www.tjmitchell.com/stuart/rosslyn.html), which details the 27-year project to crack the chapel's code.

"It was only a matter of time before the symbolism began to thaw out and begin to make sense to scientific and musical perception."

The 15th Century Rosslyn Chapel, about seven miles south of the Scottish capital Edinburgh, featured in the last part of Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code," the bestselling novel that was turned into a Hollywood film.

Stuart Mitchell said he and his father were intrigued by 13 intricately carved angel musicians on the arches of the chapel and by 213 carved cubes depicting geometric-type patterns.

"They are of such exquisite detail and so beautiful that we thought there must be a message here," he told Reuters.

Years of research led the Mitchells to an ancient musical system called cymatics, or Chladni patterns, which are formed by sound waves at specific pitches.

The two men matched each of the patterns on the carved cubes to a Chladni pitch, and were able finally to unlock the melody.

Update: fixed link

4 comments:

Steve Bates said...: <grumpy_musical_scholar_mode>

Color me skeptical.

It's a little difficult to discern the character of the supposedly decrypted melody in that excerpt, because the realization by Stuart Mitchell is very late 16th-century (at least) in character.

I know what 15th-century music sounds like, at least French music. Even allowing for this being "discovered" in Scotland, where indeed a rather different flavor of music was being composed, I find it implausible that this segment, as recorded, is really 15th-century music.

Contrast that with the fact that 20th- and 21st-century composers often choose an organizing principle for their music that is extramusical. (My composition teacher relates that in his own student days he wrote a piece based on the acceleration curve of a certain Ferrari automobile.) As an organizing device for newly composed "old" music, such carvings could serve well indeed.

And... "cymatics"? "Chladni patterns"? Gimme a break! It's a clever promo for an album of new music, a good way to make old-sounding new music stand out in a sea of available recordings. I admire their gumption and their cleverness, but I doubt their scholarship.

</grumpy_musical_scholar_mode>; 5/1/07, 6:46 PM
ellroon said...: Never doubt the Scottish craftiness or 27 year obsession... or something. I appreciate the grumpy musical scholar visiting even though he punches a jaggedity hole right in the middle of my marvelous mystery chapel music thing.

We'll have to hear the hooting and tooting to see if it's any good, whether they actually unthawed medieval music or not....; 5/1/07, 7:08 PM
Steve Bates said...: If they hadn't tied it to Rosslyn, right after Rosslyn became famous in a novel and a movie, I might be more inclined to accept their conjecture.

But it's all too easy just to make it up. As I look up from my chair, I see a bookcase filled mostly with Holmesiana of various sorts... two editions of the Canon, parodies, pastiches, lots of post-Conan-Doyle Holmes novels, etc. If I chose, i could proclaim that the sequence of colors of the spines of those books had deep musical significance, and transcribe a composition from those spines. Having once had some craft in the area of composition, I might even make a respectable musical work that way. But there is no real-world sense in which those book spines are an encrypted composition waiting to be discovered. As I said, it's just too easy, 27 years or no 27 years, to make it up if you want to see it badly enough.

Or maybe I'm just too much a natural skeptic. Unlike Fox Mulder, I don't have a sign with the caption "I Want to Believe" on my office wall.; 5/1/07, 9:00 PM
ellroon said...: Well... They couldn't really say they had this brilliant idea on how to make money off of the church just last year, could they? Just because the place is now swarming with tourists?

Takes all the mystery away....; 5/1/07, 9:14 PM