Listen to a Song That Hasn’t Been Played for 1,000 Years

This ancient song has been lost since the 11th century but is now available for us to listen to thanks to the University of Cambridge. 

Its name is “Songs of Consolation,” and it is actually the musical retelling of the 6th-century text by Roman philosopher Boethius. The Consolation of Philosophy, one of the most important works of the Middle Ages, was written during his imprisonment, shortly before his execution for treason. 

It took the team at the University of Cambridge two decades to reconstruct the song.  Medieval musicians used neumes, a different system to note musical outlines. “Neumes indicate melodic direction and details of vocal delivery without specifying every pitch and this poses a major problem… .” Dr. Sam Barrett of Cambridge University said. 

The breakthrough came when researchers rediscovered the missing part of the 11th-century manuscript, which they used to piece together the mysterious “Songs of Consolation.” “Without this extraordinary piece of luck, it would have been much, much harder to reconstruct the songs,” Barrett added.

Detail from the Cambridge Songs manuscript leaf that was stolen from and then recovered by Cambridge University Library. Cambridge University Library

Thanks to luck and researcher’s hard work, we can now enjoy an excerpt of music produced by our ancestors 1,000 years ago.