Posted on 04/30/2007 6:43:09 PM PDT by blam
Music mystery of Da Vinci Code chapel cracked
By Richard Alleyne
Last Updated: 2:05am BST 01/05/2007
A Scottish church featured in The Da Vinci Code is embroiled in a fresh mystery of secret codes and heretical knowledge - but this one could be more than mere fiction.
An ex-RAF codebreaker and his composer son say they have deciphered a musical score hidden for nearly 600 years in the elaborate carvings on the walls of Rosslyn Chapel.
Rosslyn Chapel, theories connect it with the Holy Grail, the Ark of the Covenant and the head of Christ
The pair believe the tune was encrypted because knowledge of music could have been considered heretical.
Thomas Mitchell, 75, a music teacher, and his son Stuart, 41, a pianist and composer, say they became intrigued by the markings on the chapel's arches more than 20 years ago.
Thomas was particularly struck by the 213 carved cubes in the Lady Chapel.
"I was obsessed by these symbols. I was convinced they meant something." Using codebreaking skills learned during the Korean War and his knowledge of classical music, Thomas Mitchell finally realised that the cubes depicted patterns made by sound waves.
"After scratching our brains for years the whole thing just came together in a eureka moment. We believe this is the Holy Grail of music and, unlike The Da Vinci Code, it is absolutely factual." Mr Mitchell realised the patterns on the cubes seem to match a phenomenon called cymatics or Chladni patterns. These form when a note is used to vibrate a sheet of metal or glass covered in powder.
Different frequencies produce different patterns such as flowers, diamonds and hexagons - shapes all present on the cubes.
The two men have brought the music back to life using instruments from the Middle Ages, adding words from a contemporary hymn to finish the piece, called The Rosslyn Motet.
Among the theories about Rosslyn is that it is the secret resting place of the Holy Grail, the Ark of the Covenant and even the mummified head of Christ.
Excellent. Thanks for your input.
The church didn't. Those 'theories' have all been implied by others.
There's a book out on the subject titled: Rosslyn Hoax? that should be available here in the States soon.
Thanks for your insight. I’ll have to check out Dufay’s music.
placemark
Middle Ages (?) music ping. Followed the link and listened. Sounds about right for the era, but I have insufficient credulity for the totality of the story.
My sister came up with a way to produce musical notes from number strings. “Pi” sounds wierd, but listenable.
Anyway...thought you might be interested.
Musical ping.
A bunch of squares with slightly different sizes, arranged differently, you discover what you think is a pattern, create a code, some how relate it to music...
I probably would have come up with “Running with the Devil”, by Van Halen.
Dear GadareneDemoniac,
Thanks for the ping!
Classical Music Ping List ping!
If you want on or off this list, let me know via FR e-mail.
Thanks,
David
Certain chords were considered heretical in the early years of church music. Even the BASIC TRIAD chord was considered heretical at some early point - open 5ths were OK, the 3rds were considered to be the "problem".
Very early Christian church music was written with squares.
Could be. I’ve sung a madrigal by HVIII. It was ok, not great. It was about good friends, drinking, and partying.
My music prof doesn't care for the records by the Anonymous Four - he says their style is too clinical, not warm enough. But there are quite a number of good recordings out of Dufay's work - both secular and sacred. The Mass L'homme Armé (what they call a cantus firmus - all the parts based on a popular tune, in this case a song "The armed man") is probably his most famous work. I checked Amazon and they have a bunch of his stuff, by various performers.
Just consider: the most common source for a Mass setting during this period was to use a popular song as a cantus firmus or recurrent theme - one example is Dufay's Mass 'l'Homme armé', based on a popular ditty that probably originated with the Crusades. If secular music was so heretical, what were all the major composers doing using it to set Masses?
It is true that some intervals were considered "imperfect" but that has nothing to do with the Church and everything to do with the ancient Greek theories of music.
It's difficult for us to understand what the problem was now, because we all are used to the adjusted or tempered Western scale -- based on the piano scale, which is not a true even division of the octave. The medievals inherited the "Pythagorean tuning", which WAS an equal division, so you have to have one place in the scale where the interval sounds cranky. Especially if you're playing in different keys -- if you start with a pretty good tuning in in C Major, you're going to be WAY out by the time you get around to, say, A flat major.
What you are thinking of as a "third" was actually an augmented fourth in modern terms -- that's why it was considered the "devil's interval" - it sounded like the devil (still does). That term, by the way, didn't show up until much later, the medievals called it a "wolf interval" because it howled like a wolf.
I’d like to know more about their methodology. If they really got at least three vocal lines and two instrumental lines off these carvings, and got them by testing frequencies on a medium to reverse engineer their way into the patterns, and there was a high correlation of the frequencies to the patterns, and these harmonies were produced, then I think it’s fascinating, and not so far beyond the ken of engineers who could design and build churches like this in the first place.
Maybe it’s not so great, but who knows who they got to write the music... it may be like the dancing bear, not so much whether he dances well or badly but that he dances at all.
I could also do without all the speculation behind the motives etc. Scientists oftenseem to do this - give you some facts and then attempt to inject a lot of sheer speculation and then try to pass it off as if written in stone. Maybe they just did it because they thought it was cool, as do we.
And if you play it backwards, it says, “I . . . Buried . . . Paul . . . “
Nawww, the REAL music is “Freebird”.
But I just don't see how it could work the other way around -- how you could get all that information from a (relatively) simple pattern on a chapel wall.
I think it's like the folks who find all sorts of prophecies in numerical analysis of Bible verses. If you know where you want to go, you start fudging things to get there (what they called the "Finagle Factor" when my husband was at Ga. Tech - "the number which, added to, subtracted from, multiplies by or divided into, the answer you got, gives the correct one.")
Oh - I forgot to mention - the quote about the bear was actually dear Dr. Johnson — ‘Sir, a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprized to find it done at all.’
Yeah, we sing anglican chant in that notation every sunday. It’s not easy.
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