Musical Da Vinci Code

The world premiere performance, or at least the first performance in centuries, of a piece of music recorded in an ancient code took place May 18.

In the 15th-century Rosslyn Chapel in Scotland, carved angel musicians accompany cubes sequentially arranged across arches and carved with geometric patterns that a father and son team have discovered represent tones. Sounds like The Da Vinci Code? Well, this chapel was actually feature in both the book and movie versions of the book. (I have neither read or seen it though, so I don't know if it's in connection to the mysterious music.)

This real code was broken by Thomas Mitchell, a 75-year-old musician and former code breaker for the Royal Air Force who spent 27 years on the puzzle. His son Stuart, a composer and pianist, produced the music with authentic medieval instruments and added a contemporary hymn.

Thomas Mitchell’s website has a sample of The Rosslyn Motet, as they named it, and a video demonstrating how they broke the code with an ancient musical system called cymatics. The video is truly amazing: a must-see!

The first performance was so popular that they held another this past weekend, on June 1. It is also available on CD.

“It’s not something you would want to put on in the car and listen to, but it’s certainly an interesting piece of music,” Simon Beattie of the Rosslyn Chapel Trust told Reuters. “It’s got a good medieval sound to it.”