This blog is where I share resources from each Imaginary Song Hunt session, along with a Zoom video for anyone who wants to catch up. Feel free to use the ‘comments’ box below to share feedback, fun facts, or just to say hello!
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31st January 2024:
Create Your Own Cædmon’s Hymn
This session explored the oldest known poem in the English language, Cædmon’s Hymn, which, according to the 8th-century historian Bede’s account, came to Cædmon in a divine dream, even though he couldn’t sing or play music. In Bede’s narrative, Cædmon sang the song to various people, including the Whitby Abbess Hild, who were moved by its quality, and the song thereafter became widely known. No musical notation has survived for this ‘song’, so I think it’s fun to reimagine possible melodies for it. The resources here give a glimpse into the process that Hanna Marti and I used to create our own version of the hymn. I am hoping that they might be of use to others too! There’s no right or wrong answer, so plenty of scope for creative interpretation.
Slides from the session
I usually embed the slideshow from every Hunt here, but this time I’m including a ‘Medieval Reimagining Toolkit’ (by myself and Hanna Marti) instead. It’s based on the slideshow used in a slightly longer version of this workshop, and includes a lot of additional information about helpful books, articles, and online resources, with links you can click if you want to go into more depth on any of the topics. I hope it’s interesting! I can’t pretend it’s comprehensive – not even close… so if you notice something important that we’ve missed, please pop it in the comments below.
This is a link to a downloadable PDF version of this Toolkit.
Video
Full session, for anyone who’d like to catch up:
I’m still editing the performance video I showed during this session (busy couple of weeks!) But you can see it in the above video, at 16:22 in draft form, and it will be on YouTube with full subtitles from 11 Feb.
Scores
Caedmon’s Hymn, S Conner 👈 This is a very rough score of the version on my album, Riddle Songs – feel free to make use of it for your own projects, if it’s helpful, but the document itself for your eyes only.
Further listening
No songs in Old English have survived with notation, but here are a couple of gorgeous albums that will enable you to immerse yourself in very rigorously reconstructed sounds of early medieval England.
And, the research projects associated with them:
- Sam Barrett’s Restoring Lost Songs project (with Sequentia)
- Susan Rankin publication list (see especially ‘On the Treatment of Pitch in Early Music Writing’ and ‘Writing and Reading. Word and Sound in the Ninth Century’.
Other essential listening/watching is Hanna Marti’s video introduction to Orpheus: the Ovid Project. In a similar vein, Sequentia’s Monks Singing Pagans programme focused on classical texts in medieval song, and you can watch a video about the project (which sadly doesn’t exist as an album).
From the Song Hunters…
Anything to share? I’d love to see it! x