Sequentia, the harpist-singer Hanna Marti, songs from The Consolation of Philosophy have now been brought back to life.
Added Barrett: “Ben tries out various possibilities and I react to them – and vice versa. When I see him working through the options that an 11th century person had, it’s genuinely sensational; at times you just think ‘that’s it!’ He brings the human side to the intellectual puzzle I was trying to solve during years of continual frustration.”
While it’s unclear whether Boethius ever wrote Consolation’s poetry to be sung, the Roman philosopher recorded and collected ideas about music in other hugely influential works. During the Middle Ages, until the end of the 12th century, it was common for great works such as Boethius’ to be set to music as a way of learning and ritualising the texts.
There have been other attempted settings of The Consolation of Philosophy across the centuries; especially during the renaissance and the 19th century when melodies were invented to sound like popular songs of the day.
But it was the rediscovered leaf of the Cambridge Songs that allowed the crucial breakthrough in being able to finally reassemble the work as it would have been heard around 1,000 years ago.
Originating in the Rhineland in the first half of the 11th century, the Cambridge Songs makes up the final part of an anthology of Latin texts that was held in Canterbury before making its way to Cambridge University Library by the late 17th century.
In 1840, a Germanic scholar cut out an important leaf and returned home. For 142 years, Cambridge presumed it lost before a chance discovery by historian and Liverpool University academic Margaret Gibson in 1982.
During an unscheduled visit to a Frankfurt library, Gibson enquired as to whether they had any Boethius manuscripts and was told of a single leaf in their collections. Gibson immediately recognised the leaf as coming from a copy of Consolation and its likely importance for the number of neumes it contained.