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."
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.
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I am forever amazed and humbled by how bright so very many Freepers are. Thank you for the info.
A pleasure.
We are spoiled these days. I was expecting a link to an mp3 file where I could hear the music. Do I actually have to wait????
Be afraid. Be very afraid.
Written music is encrypted even now. The encryption is standardized as notation, but when this piece was done the modern standard did not exist. Even so, modern avant-garde composers sometimes use non-standard notation and if you don't know the code nothing but gibberish will result.
;)
It's what we do. In art anyway there is a pattern that will remain undiscovered until critics find it even though the patterns they find do probably not include the pattern the artist was following.
Don’t be ruining a good conspiracy theory with the truth.
Next, you’ll be telling me that Hiram Abiff isn’t depicted in the Last Supper as the waiter.
See! Convincing proof!
It's what we do.
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True, true, true, b/c it's hardwired into us. It's why we see a man(or bunny) in the moon; clouds shaped like boats, teddy bears or whatever; why lazily starring up a ceiling with its bumps and whorls of plaster, or in the shower idly glancing at the pattern of shower tiles, we "see" things -- faces, etc.
Even as a little, tiny kid our eyes glom onto and our brains work to find "things" in random patterns -- like clouds and shower tiles. So in this case Musicians unlock mystery melody in chapel is almost certainly a case of "We see what we look for".
But I guess anything's possible!
Interesting Masonic sidelight: my gg grandfather was involved in the Spring Hill election riots, where Redemptionists got in a brawl with a carpetbagger judge when he tried to "recount" the ballots in an election. During the melee, somebody knocked over the lamp. Somebody grabbed the judge under the store counter and was going to shoot him, when "he gave the Masonic Sign of Distress and was saved."
This may be of interest to you:
http://www.casca.ca/ecass/issues/2005-me/features/turner/Stars%20of%20St_John’s.html
Another example of someone secretly leaving their imprint in a church.
Thanks! Love it :)
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