In brief, a carver was interested in reproducing some 16th century wooden carvings from Stirling Castle in Scotland, and found that the border of one of the carvings was a sequence of O’s, I’s and II’s, not simply a decorative border.
Early music historians have concluded that the pattern was a form of music notation - not a complete score, but framework that would then allow improvisation, which was the pattern for court musicians at that time.
A harpist has made an attempt to recreate the tune, which the BBC article links to.
This seems an awful lot of extrapolation from a very slender reed. Is there really enough information in a trinary code to give the framework of a harp tune? And, how can a modern musician look at it and come up with an interpretation, 5 centuries after that trinary code was last used?
First of all, thanks very much for that link, it was very interesting.
With regards to your question. here’s my considered opinion as a harper who is no expert, but who knows a fair bit about this kind of stuff.
In a way all Irish and Scottish harpers are extrapolating since the harp tradition was broken, i.e. at one point no one was playing harp in the Scottish or Irish tradition any more. All we have to go on, apart from this new discovery, are transcriptions of harpers which were done by classical musicians at the time. Unfortunately, the transcribers were listening to popular music with a classical ear causing them to mistranscribe or “correct” what they heard.
Of course ever an incorrect transcription would give a harper a bit more to go on than this “binary system”, but I’m just making the point that harpers are well-used to extrapolating, doing musical research and listening to tradition pieces from an unbroken tradition such a pipes for inspiration and education. (This piece sounds “pipy”, to me. Actually it sounds pibroch style Pibroch - Wikipedia, but I think that is likely to be the harper’s interpretation)
Secondly, as a vehement trad-head I am a firm believer in the oral tradition. The beauty of oral tradition is that, since a piece isn’t written down (or if it is we don’t care) there is no one true way that a piece must be played. Therefore we can have variations, spin-offs, mistakes that catch-on etc without anyone being able to say those are incorrect. So then, it is less a matter of “is this the music that was written?” and more a matter of “is this a good piece of music in the traditional style”? I think it is.
definitely agree on the pibroch feel to the interpretation - it sound very attractive.
of course, there’s a considerable body of thought that pibroch itself has a relationship with harping - whether pipers borrowed harp music for the pipes and then developed it, or that both early harping and pibroch shared a common musical tradition.
And, it’s a form of notation that was never used in Scotland … found in a castle in Scotland. And not in a location where it could actually be used for making music, but on a random architectural ornament.
Composers have had their portraitspainted holding pieces of music they’d composed, so it’s not that far-fetched an idea in the first place. I can’t speak to whether that particular system was used in Scotland or not (no doubt the harpers in the thread can come back on that) but the pattern on the Stirling Head certainly doesn’t look like a merely decorative border. Starting at the 12:00 position:
I O I I O I II
O I I I O I II
O I I I O I II
O I O I I O I II
O I O I I I O I II
I O I I I O I II
I O I I I O I II
I O I II
I O I I I O I II
O I I O I O II I O
There’s clearly a recurring structure that’s more than just a decorative flourish going on here.
Finally, as an afterthought, unless there’s incontrovertible evidence in the form of a contract or a work record or some such, we have no idea where the work either was done or the national origins of the workmen who did the originals; it’s certainly not unlikely that the work was done by someone who came from a place where the system was used, pulled a 16th-century ‘Kilroy was here’, and recorded a tune for posterity in the masonry. There’s just not enough proof against the hypothesis to dismiss it as ‘faces in the clouds’.
From the evidence in that article and that recording, I’d render a verdict of “Not Proven”. I don’t say it’s impossible to use a trinary code to represent music - Hell, you could write out Adrian Belew’s “Big Electric Cat”, Spinal Tap’s “Bitch School” and most of the collected works of Ted Nugent using only two chord symbols…
I’m skeptical because why is the first occurrence of this found not on a scrap of paper in with some late 16th century/early 17th century lute music, but on the rim of a carving that it took a master carver restoring the piece to notice? Yes, I know, paper burns, and that 1540 was just before some major events took place, but still, I’m not convinced.
All that being said, this is an article that glosses over, well, everything that the music scholar would have used to deduce that music, and whole dinosaurs are constructed based on the fossil remains of a toe bone and a rib. However, until I get to see those middle steps, I’m not convinced.
That harper, however, is welcome to come over to my house for Burns day dinner - authentic or not, I liked the piece.
I have heard of Barnaby Brown, one of the commentators quoted in the article - he’s pretty well-known in the piping community as someone with a lot of knowledge of early piping traditions. However, he doesn’t appear to have been involved in the reconstruction, just providing some comment on it.
Just a thanks for the OP - fascinating. And I attended Stirling Uni for my 3rd year of University, so the mention brought a bit of nostalgia for me…pub crawls in the nearby village of Bridge of Allen - hearing local players…
Apropos of not much, here’s the fellow who knows the most about Scottish lute music of a slightly later period - Ronn McFarlane. His recordings “The Scottish Lute” and “Highland King” are outstanding.
PookahMacPhellimey can probably give a more detailed answer, but I think the basic reason was the decline of the clan system and abandonment of traditional celtic culture in general by the leaders of the celtic countries, who started to adopt the cultural models of the other European countries, such as England and France, to show that they weren’t barbarians on the fringe of Europe.
The harp in Celtic cultures was a courtly instrument. Harpers were part of the entourage of the clan chiefs and great leaders. It wasn’t a folk instrument. So when the leaders of the Scottish and Irish groupings started to adopt the courtly models of the English and the French, the traditional harp culture went into sharp decline. The musical traditions of the Continent supplanted them, which meant that the celtic harpists gradually disappeared - and since their music training methods were oral, their music also disappeared. (Which isn’t to say that the harp didn’t feature in European musical traditions, of course - but the music played on the harp in the other European countries was the same sort of music that was played on other instruments, not the traditional celtic music.)
There were similar declines with the pipes, but that came later, towards the end of the 18th century. The pipes survived because they were a folk instrument as well as a courtly instrument, so even if the clan chiefs no longer encouraged piping as much, the pipes were still played in the folk cultures. (The pipes also survived because the British adopted the policy of having highland regiments, where piping was encouraged. That policy had a long-term effect on piping, by emphasising the military aspect of the music over the folk aspects, such as using the pipes for dances. Interestingly, researchers into Cape Breton piping have uncovered survivors of the earlier folk piping traditions which have disappeared in Scotland.)
PookahMacPhellimey and Le Ministre de l’au-delà - given that transcription, do you think either of you could use it as the basis for an improvised tune? I’m still curious about the mechanics of how the researchers think this amounts to an outline of a tune.
Just a very amateur musical view… as a very poor guitarist, with a little bit of instinctive primal style… it looks like very basic Tablature to me. Speaking as someone who has no real learn-ed experience and can’t read music.
I still think it’s actually a code to tell us where the albino has hidden the anti-matter; it’ll be behind the silver door to the right because that’s the direction the head is facing…
I couldn’t do anything in the style, because what I don’t know about traditional harp music could be sold by the boxcar load. So, here’s a suggestion for a way to derive more than just three notes out of three symbols. Let’s say, for argument, that I = G, II = D and O = B. That gives us a pretty boring tune.
But now, say that I, II and O have one ‘set’ of decorative pitches before the note when they start a phrase, so now I = DEF GGGG when it’s on its own. G is still the main note, but there’s a run of notes up to it. You can now do the same with II and O.
Now, let’s change that rule up a bit - that’s for when they’re at the beginning of the line, but when I comes after II, the run up to it goes FED GGGG. When I comes after O, the run comes down BA GGGG. When I comes after another I, the run diddles up and down GAGF GGGG. We’ve just got 4 rules for a run of notes out of I based on its position - first thing in the line, after II, after O or after I. Do the same for the other two, and we now have 12 rules for each symbol.
Now you can do the same for after - when I is the last thing in the line, do one kind of run after it. When I is followed by O, do a different run. We’ve now got 24 rules out of three symbols.
So here is a total wild ass solution to the situation -
I is G.
O is B.
II is D.
I is preceded by DEF when it’s the first thing in the line.
I is preceded by FED when I follows II.
I is preceded by BA when I follows O.
I is preceded by GAGF when I follows I.
O is preceded by AC when it’s the first thing in the line.
O is preceded by CA when O follows II.
O is preceded by CAC when O follows I.
O is preceded by ACA when O follows O.
II is preceded by FEC when it’s the first thing in the line.
II is preceded by CEF when II follows I.
II is preceded by FEG when II follows O.
II is preceded by GEF when II follows II.
(My head’s starting to hurt, how’s yours?)
So based on just that set of decorations to the ‘main’ note, we now have -
DEF GGGG CAC BBBB BA GGGG GAGF GGGG CAC BBBB BA GGGG CEF DDDD as a realization of the first line. If I pushed another rule into operation after each note, I could vary that rather simple G B G G B G D melody much further…
So, this isn’t as far-fetched as it might sound - for example, in baroque figured bass one note and a number gave you the code for how to voice the harmony to the entire piece. It was a more complex code, but it was representing more complex music. The question for me is still ‘why is this the first example of it that we’ve found?’
I couldn’t make anything of the trinary stuff, no, because I haven’t a clue about such things. However, if the notes on which I was basing the piece were not too far out of line with Scottish harp music in general, I think I could do something with, for example, Le Ministre de l’au-delà’s transcription below and I have enough experience to make it into something that would sound traditional to traditional musicians. A more well-researched or advanced harper would do a much better job, no doubt.
Of course I couldn’t guarantee that what I extrapolated would sound like what was orgininally played or intended (if indeed, anything ever was). The more research you do, the more likely you are to get close to the original. My point, however, is that whether or not your interpretation is “correct” is less important in a living tradition than in classical music as traditional music leaves a lot more room for individual interpretation so that musicians are quite free to interprete a melody in quite different without it being “incorrect”. Needless to say, we are presuming that the code was actually intended as a piece of music, otherwise we might as well flip a coin and extrapolate a tune from that.
Northern Piper is on the money about why the harp tradition was broken. The only extra information I have to add is that the ancient harpers played on metal strings (this is also the harp you see on a Guinness glass, Irish euros etc) whereas most modern Celtic harps have gut or nylon strings. The sound is quite different and playing technique also differs significantly. However, the metal-strung harp is making a comeback and the clip in the article is a metal-strung harp. Anyone who enjoyed it should check out Ann Heymann as she does this kind of thing extremely well.
You’re intrigued?! Heck, after that display of code-breaking, *I’m" intrigued! Dude, you totally have to write the **Da Vinci Code **of harp playing!
It turns out the Illuminati have encoded their evil plan to take over the world in a bunch of medieval harps. Only **Le Ministre **- with his badass harp-decoding skills, can break the code in time.
You would be so in! You could take over the franchise from Tom Hanks! Audrey Tatou could be your love interest!
