Rosslyn Chapel and the Music of Stone
Rosslyn Chapel is a medieval chapel in Scotland getting quite a lot of attention in recent years. I have to admit that I have just about zero interest in The Da Vinci Code, but the chapel’s appearance in the novel has certainly given it a new claim to fame. That aside, Rosslyn Chapel in a very interesting place for other reasons…
Father and son Thomas and Stuart Mitchell report they have found and deciphered a musical code in the stone architecture of the building.
From their site:
“Rosslyn Chapel holds a musical mystery in its architecture and design. At one end of the chapel, on the ceiling are 4 cross-sections of arches containing elaborate symbolic designs on each array of cubes (in actual fact they are rectangles mostly). The ‘cubes’ are attached to the arches in a musically sequential way. …After 27 years of study and research by Stuart’s father, Thomas J. Mitchell, we believe he has found the pitches and tonality that match the symbols on each cube, revealing its melodic and harmonic progressions. It is what we could call ‘frozen music’, a little like cryogenics. The music has been frozen in time by symbolism, it was only a matter of time before the symbolism began to ‘thaw out’ and begin to make sense to scientific and musical perception.”
Using period instruments, the Mitchells’ musical interpretation has been given sound and will be performed before and audience for the first time later this month. You can listen to a sample of it here. It’s quite nice.
Whether or not these shapes were originally intended to represent music, the concept of taking architectural patterns and interpreting them as sound is fascinating to me. (It also reminds me of a recent Achewood in which Ray imagines a road with music encoded in its grooves.) The possibilities for this kind of music-making are endless.
music, conceptual music, rosslyn chapel, scotland, da vinci code, hidden music, achewood, ray smuckles
May 10th, 2007 at 8:56 am
My husband was telling me about this! It’s just too cool…a hundreds year old mystery solved, perhaps
April 17th, 2008 at 3:25 am
Treasure News: Could the Da Vinci code continue to the Mayan civilization, the Rosslyn chapel gives plausible clues of a Mayan connection. One of the clues that mystifies me is the depiction of corn and aloe in the Rosslyn chapel… http://oakislandmoneypitblogspotcom.blogspot.com/
Keith Ranville