A Scottish father and son team of musicians (and the father was also a former codebreaker for the British government) have seemingly unlocked a mysterious musical code carved in the ceiling of Rosslyn Chapel, which was featured prominently in the blockbuster book and movie “The DaVinci Code”.
The carvings on rectangular blocks on the ceiling of the chapel turn out to represent the patterns produced by different sounds and resonances.
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. And to confirm this, at the ends of each arch there is an angel playing a musical instrument of a different kind.
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.
Tommy Mitchell (Stuart’s father) unravelled the music from the symbolism and Stuart has produced the music using authentic instrumentation in the 1400’s.
Tommy began work on this amazing project over 25 years ago and the Rosslyn Motet is the culmination of a wonderful collaboration with his son Stuart who is the production manager of the project.
You can read the Reuters story here.
The website put up by the musicians can be found here, complete with a video demonstration of the resonance patterns and an excerpt of the realized work.