In Scotland’s first full-length printed book, a piece of “lost” music was found within its pages. It is providing clues as to what music sounded like five centuries ago.
The musical score contains just 55 notes. Scholars from the Edinburgh College of Art and KU Leuven in Belgium have been looking into its origins.
It is a rare example from pre-Reformation Scotland in the early 16th century from Scottish religious institutions. The score is also the only piece from this period in northeastern Scotland to have survived after 500 years.
The discovery was made in a copy of The Aberdeen Breviary of 1510, a collection of hymns, prayers, psalms, and readings used for daily worship in Scotland. It included detailed descriptions of the lives of Scottish saints.
The Aberdeen Breviary resulted from an initiative by King James IV. He issued a royal patent to print books about Scottish religious practices to eliminate the need to import texts from England or Europe.
The text is known as the “Glamis copy” since it used to be housed in Glamis Castle in Angus. Now, it is at the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh.
The musical score has no title, text, or attribution, but the researchers have still been able to identify it as a unique musical harmonization of Cultor Dei, a hymn sung at nighttime during the season of Lent.
The composition is from the Aberdeenshire region. It may have links to St. Mary’s Chapel, Rattray, and Aberdeen Cathedral.
The researchers were studying the handwritten annotations in the Glamis copy’s margins when they came across the score.
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The musical fragment was spread over two lines on a blank page in a section dedicated to an early morning service called Matins. The second line was about half the length of the first.
The team was confused by the music’s presence. Although it wasn’t part of the book’s original printing, the music was written on a page bound into the book rather than added later, indicating that the writer wanted to keep the music and the book together.
It was unclear whether the music was sacred, non-religious, or for voices to sing because there were no textual annotations on the page to explain its purpose.
After conducting further investigations, the researchers came to the conclusion that the music was polyphonic, which is when two or more lines of a melody are sung or played simultaneously. This was common in Scottish religious institutions, but very few examples have survived today.
When taking a closer look, one of the researchers realized that the music matched a Gregorian chant melody, specifically a three-or-four-voice musical harmonization of the hymn Cultor Dei.
“Identifying a piece of music is a real ‘Eureka’ moment for musicologists. Better still, the fact that our tenor part is a harmony to a well-known melody means we can reconstruct the other missing parts,” said David Coney from the Edinburgh College of Art.
“As a result, from just one line of music scrawled on a blank page, we can hear a hymn that had lain silent for nearly five centuries, a small but precious artifact of Scotland’s musical and religious traditions.”
The research was published in the journal Music & Letters.