Life & Work Magazine
Life & Work Magazine


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Lost music discovery

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.

Scholars from Edinburgh College of Art and KU Leuven in Belgium have been investigating the origins of the musical score – which contains only 55 notes – to cast new light on music from pre-Reformation Scotland in the early sixteenth-century.

The scholars made the discovery in a copy of The Aberdeen Breviary of 1510, a collection of prayers, hymns, psalms and readings used for daily worship in Scotland. 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.

David Coney, of 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.”

The study is published in the Journal Music and Letters.

This article appears in the March 2025 Issue of Life and Work

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This article appears in the March 2025 Issue of Life and Work