Creative Practice and the Limits of Knowledge in Reconstructing Lost Songs from Boethius’ On the Consolation of Philosophy

Although a handful of neumations for the thirty-nine poems of Boethius’ final and most widely read work, On the Consolation of Philosophy, have been known since the inception of modern musicological study, reconstructions have rarely been attempted due to an almost complete absence of surviving pitched versions of the melodies. Following a systematic study of neumed manuscripts dating from the ninth to eleventh centuries and identification of underlying principles of melodic design, it is now possible to attempt informed reconstructions. Even so, the leap from scholarship to modern performance remains substantial, involving a preliminary need to recreate melodies through experimentation. Extended collaboration with members of the group Sequentia provided an opportunity to explore ways in which creative practice might supplement scholarly knowledge, whether through posing new research questions, through the formation and exploration of hypotheses, or through recourse to memorized practices built up through sustained engagement with early medieval repertories and instruments. Taking a recovered mid eleventh-century leaf of the Cambridge Songs as a focus for investigation, reconstructions of songs from the first book of Boethius’ De consolatione philosophiae were newly proposed. The status of results obtained through creative practice is debated, but comparison with the way other disciplines have proceeded under similar conditions reveals acceptance of experimentation as a mode of enquiry. Early medieval musicology should similarly acknowledge the potential of performance to supplement philology in seeking to reconstruct lost songs from notated traces