Musical reconstructions

It is likely that one reason behind the somewhat uncritical embrace of claims for medieval origins for some 'traditional' Scottish songs is that there is not much else available. There are no surviving sources for secular song; and only a handful of manuscript sources for religious music, which tend to largely overlap in content and/or style with sources for church music in other countries. Good evidence that Scotland was not a backwater but rather participated in a Europe-wide musical culture; but not so helpful if trying to programme a concert of 'medieval Scottish music'.

Another consequence seems to be the fad for 'discovering' early music from Scotland that has been preserved in some less obvious form than musical notation. A recent example that attracted substantial attention was the 'Music of the Stirling Heads' (a reasonably clear, if uncritical, summary of the 'discovery' is given by harpist Bill Taylor here). An apparently arbitrary pattern of O, I, II marks around the edge of a ceiling roundel carved in 1540 has been interpreted as equivalent to the binary sequences (0s and 1s) found in the Robert ap Huw manuscript of harp music , where they represent patterns of musical tension and resolution in the compositions it contains. So at best this is the barest outline of music, on the basis of which anything like a 'reconstruction' of a tune, let alone an instrumental arrangement (or a dance!) is wild speculation.

But far more likely, I think, just a bit of random decoration.