'Eureka' moment as lost 500-year-old Scottish hymn heard once more

Scholars have hit a “Eureka” moment after discovering how a rare piece of music found in Scotland’s oldest printed book may have sounded.

Scholars from Edinburgh College of Art working with counterparts in Belgium have been investigating the origins of the musical score, which contains only 55 notes. The score was discovered in a copy of the Aberdeen Breviary of 1510.

A fragment of ‘lost’ music found in the pages of Scotland’s first full-length printed book is providing clues to what music sounded like five centuries ago. | NLS

The book is a collection of prayers, hymns, psalms and readings used for daily worship in Scotland, including detailed writings on the lives of Scottish saints.

A fragment of music – spread over two lines – was found stuck into the main book in a section dedicated to Matins, an early morning service.

Despite the musical score having no text, title or attribution, researchers have identified it as a unique musical harmonisation of Cultor Dei, a night-time hymn sung during the season of Lent.

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David Coney, from Edinburgh College of Art, who discovered the identity of the music, said: “Identifying a piece of music is a real ‘Eureka’ moment for musicologists.

“Better still, the fact that our tenor part is a harmony to a well-known melody means we can reconstruct the other missing parts.

“As a result, from just one line of music scrawled on a blank page, we can hear a hymn that had lain silent for nearly five centuries, a small, but precious artefact of Scotland’s musical and religious traditions.”

Researchers say the tantalising discovery is a rare example of music from Scottish religious institutions 500 years ago, and is the only piece that survives from the north-east of Scotland from this period.

The score was found among numerous handwritten annotations within the ‘Glamis copy’ of the book, which was formerly held in Glamis Castle, but now in the National Library of Scotland.

The presence of the music was a puzzle for the team. It was not part of the original printed book, yet it was written on a page bound into structure of the volume, not slipped in at a later date. This suggests the writer wanted to keep the music and the book together.

Researchers believe it has probable links to St Mary’s Chapel in Rattray, Aberdeenshire, and to Aberdeen Cathedral.

In the absence of any textual annotations on the page, it was not clear whether the music was sacred, secular or even for voices at all, the researchers say.

After investigation they deduced it was polyphonic – when two or more lines of independent melody are sung or played at the same time. Sources from the time say this technique was common in Scottish religious institutions. However, very few examples have survived to the present day.

Looking closer, one of the team members realised the music was a perfect fit with a Gregorian chant melody, specifically that it was the tenor part from a three or four-part musical harmonisation on the hymn Cultor Dei.

Lead author, Dr Paul Newton-Jackson, of KU Leuven, said the findings underscored the “crucial role of marginalia” as a source of new insights into musical culture where little notated material survived.

He said: “It may well be that further discoveries, musical or otherwise, still lie in wait in the blank pages and margins of other 16th-century printed books held in Scotland’s libraries and archives.”

Dr James Cook, from Edinburgh College of Art, said: “For a long time, it was thought that pre-Reformation Scotland was a barren wasteland when it comes to sacred music. Our work demonstrates that, despite the upheavals of the Reformation which destroyed much of the more obvious evidence of it, there was a strong tradition of high-quality music-making in Scotland’s cathedrals, churches and chapels, just as anywhere else in Europe.”