Music

Listen to this medieval music played for the first time in 1,000 years

by Jeremy Mersereau

Back in the Middle Ages, life was different: peasants only made one florin per a noble’s Angevin pound for equivalent tilling, and the powerful leech HMO had a stranglehold on the chest of the healthcare system. Another difference: musical notation wasn’t in the form of the staved notation that we know and scrupulously avoid studying today.

Before its introduction in the 11th century, musical notation came in the form of passed down oral tradition and neumes, coded signs above the texts of chants to indicate pitch, with absolutely nothing to indicate rhythm. And so, it’s incredibly difficult to translate music from the Middle Ages accurately, or even fuzzily, but that didn’t stop Sam Barrett from the University of Cambridge from spearheading an effort to perform a set of songs for the first time in hundreds of years. Check it out below:

Barrett has been working for nearly two decades to decode a manuscript known as The Cambridge Songs, an 11th century collection of 83 neume-notated Latin poems, with the aim of accurately performing the music it contains. Using a previously-lost section of the text that contains examples of different neumatic patterns based on The Consolation of Philosophy by Boethius, a sixth-century philosopher beloved by the world’s most iconic manchild, Barrett slowly pieced together the likely final form of the music.

As Barrett got closer to finalizing his vision, he enlisted the help of medieval music specialist Benjamin Bagby of the musical ensemble Sequentia, an international group of singers, instrumentalists, and enthusiasts dedicated to the performance and study of European music written before 1300. Barrett and Bagby spent two years honing their take on the manuscript’s musical contents before they felt they were ready for public performance.

And now, these songs have been performed as closely as possible to the originals, in a special performance taking place in The University of Cambridge’s Pembroke College Chapel. Watch another example of the 1,000-year-old medieval music here:

[h/t CNET]