Rosslyn Chapel was designed in 1446 by the hereditary Prince of Orkney. He apparently drafted the decorations himself, according to the chapel website, but the work was not completed and there is not clear indication that it was performed according to his plan.
Moreover, the chapel fell into disrepair and the "carvings in the Lady Chapel" were restored in 1861. We all know what Victorian "restoration" could be like . . .
There are a limited number of notes in a scale -- there are 8 whole notes in an octave, and lots of decorative patterns are based on fours and multiples of four -- it would be far too easy to find coincidences and patterns that you could translate into something like a tune, when you are LOOKING for one. And a codebreaker should know that you can't detect a code when you only have eight letters to work with . . .
Finally, I have a large thick book of early Scottish music, and it doesn't sound like this -- it sounds a lot better. Guillaume Dufay, the Burgundian master generally considered the greatest composer of the 15th century, was getting started with his multiple voice masses and antiphons around this time -- his music is gorgeous and nothing like this. While dressed up with decent performers on contemporary instruments and (sort of) competent vocalists singing words from somewhere else, this alleged tune is still lousy. It starts no place in particular, wanders around, and arrives nowhere.
Dufay, by the way, wrote a motet in which the proportions of the phrases exactly matched the proportions of Solomon's Temple.
One other point -- instrumental accompaniment that didn't simply track the voice parts was still a couple of hundred years away.
fwiw, I just got through with a course on the history of Western church music, and this piece just doesn't SOUND right.
Well put.
Good post.
You’d also have a problem “decoding” with the time/meter, which no song is a song without.
Excellent. Thanks for your input.
Thanks for your insight. I’ll have to check out Dufay’s music.
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.