An Historical Philosophical Music Reconstructed and Performed for the First Time in 1,000 Years

Above and under, you’ll be able to watch musi­cians per­type “Songs of Con­so­la­tion,” a 1,000-year-old tune set “to the poet­ic por­tions of Roman philoso­pher Boethius’ magazine­num opus The Con­so­la­tion of Phi­los­o­phy,” an influ­en­tial medieval textual content writ­ten dur­ing the sixth cen­tu­ry. Accord­ing to Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty, the per­for­mance of the piece, which had been misplaced in time till current­ly, did­n’t come eas­i­ly:

[T]he process of per­type­ing such historic works as we speak will not be as sim­ple as learn­ing and play­ing the music in entrance of you. 1,000 years in the past, music was writ­ten in a method that report­ed melod­ic out­traces, however not ‘notes’ as as we speak’s musi­cians would recog­nise them; rely­ing on aur­al tra­di­tions and the mem­o­ry of musi­cians to maintain them alive. As a result of these aur­al tra­di­tions died out within the twelfth cen­tu­ry, it has typically been thought impos­si­ble to recon­struct ‘misplaced’ music from this period – pre­cise­ly as a result of the pitch­es are unknown.

Now, after greater than twenty years of painstak­ing work on iden­ti­fy­ing the tech­niques used to set par­tic­u­lar verse types, analysis underneath­tak­en by Cam­bridge College’s Dr Sam Bar­rett has enabled him to recon­struct melodies from the redis­cov­ered leaf of the eleventh cen­tu­ry ‘Cam­bridge Songs’.

The tune is per­fashioned right here by Ben­jamin Bag­by, Han­na Mar­ti and Nor­bert Rodenkirchen, three mem­bers of the medieval music ensem­ble referred to as Sequen­tia.

Observe: An ear­li­er ver­sion of this put up appeared on our web site in 2016.

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