A tourist inspects the cube carving's on the chapel's arches at Rosslyn Chapel near Edinburgh, Scotland May 1, 2007. (David Moir/Reuters)
Posted on 05/02/2007 6:28:52 AM PDT by NYer
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" -- one of the most successful novels of all time which has been 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.
The Mitchells have called the piece The Rosslyn Motet and added words from a contemporary hymn to complete it.
They have also scheduled a world premiere at a concert in the chapel on May 18, when four singers will be accompanied by eight musicians playing the piece on medieval instruments.
Simon Beattie of the Rosslyn Chapel Trust said he was delighted to have the mystery finally solved, and was intrigued by the music itself.
"It's not something you would want to put on in the car and listen to, but it's certainly an interesting piece of music," he said. "It's got a good medieval sound to it."
Ping!
....but can you dance to it?..............(American Bandstand).......
Pretty mysterious. If this was indeed an encrypted musical piece, why would the builders of the church encrypt it so?
ALL music is formed by sound waves at specific pitches. Actually, at specific frequencies, since it is our own brains that interpret these frequencies as pitch.
"Cymatics" is a neologism referring to the study of the aesthetics of wave patterns, and was first coined in the 1960s.
This is the usual nonsense wherein people who have stupidly wasted their time trying to find a secret pattern will themselves into seeing a pattern where none existed.
I could take a basket of marbles, throw them on the living room floor and - by assigning specific notational values to the random marbles according to color or position - use them to compose a musical piece.
A modified form of this kind of randomization is already a compositional technique in postmodern music: serialism.
Pretty cool stuff.
Can you read Norse runes? Sanskrit?
Old writing is encrypted if you can not read it. It was not until the finding of the Rosetta stone that Egyptian hieroglyphs and cuneiform were translatable. No one could read them because no one spoke those languages any more.
It is a quite remarkable depiction of the pitch pattern in a medium. I suspect it was thought to be the only way the architechs could depict the music for posterity in the chapel. Interesting it took this many huidreds of years to realize what it was. Of course identifying it as music does not explain why it was so important for them to do that with this particular ditty.
It must have been a Rosslyn/Sinclaire or a templar theme song of the era?? or something they thought worth preserving at any rate.
May not have been an ancient musical system but somebody was clued in on sound waves at the time.
Guess the take home lesson is:
If the pitch fits you must emit.
oh man....buzz killer....
oh man....buzz killer....
thanks, but alas...
Music Mystery Of Da Vinci Code Chapel Cracked (Rosslyn)
The Telegraph (UK) | 5-1-2007 | Richard Alleyne
Posted on 04/30/2007 9:43:09 PM EDT by blam
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The R. chapel is basically a giant inkblot. You can see anything you want.
It is certainly archetecturally interesting and no doubt the creators were having some fun -— and doing things like putting in random repeating patterns -— but to look for much more is a fool’s errand.
Hey, that's the best description of John Gage's 'music' I've ever heard although I've heard some of his prepared piano pieces that actually sounded pretty cool.
I thought I read the tune was an early version of “Pop Goes The Weasel”...
I have a question. Do the notes they describe fit the normal 12 (interval) octave pattern or are they ‘microtonal’?
Is there an ‘A’ at 440 above middle ‘C’?
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