Collegian Dr Paul Newton-Jackson (Hamilton 2009–2013) has played a pivotal role in revealing the secrets of a rare and historically significant piece of music. Dr Newton-Jackson’s international team has shed new light on Scotland’s pre-Reformation musical heritage through decoding and reconstructing a musical fragment contained in Scotland’s oldest printed book, published in 1510. The discovery, published in the academic journal Music & Letters, has received widespread international media coverage.

The musical discovery came about through a collaboration between scholars at the University of Edinburgh (UK) and KU Leuven (Belgium). The team found a fragmentary musical score (pictured), handwritten on a blank page within a copy of the Aberdeen Breviary known as the “Glamis Copy”, held in the National Library of Scotland. The first book to be printed in Scotland, the Breviary itself is a collection of prayers, hymns, psalms, and readings for daily worship, commissioned by King James IV of Scotland to establish distinctly Scottish religious rituals, avoiding a reliance on books imported from England or Europe.

After deciphering the musical notation, Dr Newton-Jackson and his team identified the melody as a harmonisation of a night-time hymn called Cultor Dei (“servant of God”), traditionally sung during Lent. Through painstaking research, the scholars proved that the score was a fragment of a larger piece involving multiple simultaneous melodies—a technique known as polyphony. This type of music, although common in Scottish religious institutions at the time, has left few surviving examples. The team reconstructed the missing parts of the hymn from the fragment, allowing a piece of lost music to be heard again for the first time in 500 years.

In 2014, Paul took up a Girdler’s Scholarship to study music at the University of Cambridge. He went on to receive further scholarships to study for a Master’s degree and PhD, also at Cambridge, which he completed in 2022. His doctoral thesis on the German composer Georg Philipp Telemann (1681–1767) was awarded an honourable mention by the International Musicological Society’s Outstanding Dissertation Awards. In 2023, he was offered a prestigious postdoctoral fellowship at KU Leuven in Belgium, where he now works as a specialist in early music research. He is currently writing a book on sixteenth-century Scottish music, which will be published in late 2025.

“When I set out to study at Cambridge, I had no idea how much there was still to discover about the history of music. Unearthing and reconstructing this fragment was so exciting because it gives us a glimpse of what music sounded like in Scotland five centuries ago. There’s a lot of beautiful ancient music hiding in the archives, just waiting to be dug out.”

The researchers believe the fragment originated in Aberdeenshire. Through a meticulous investigation into other handwritten annotations in the Aberdeen Breviary, Dr Newton-Jackson and his team were able to identify the book’s original owners. They determined that the most likely person to have written down the music was a chaplain at St Mary’s Rattray, a rural settlement in Scotland’s northeastern corner. This chaplain also had probable links with Aberdeen Cathedral, a hugely important site for music during this period, but from which not a single note of written music has survived.

This discovery challenges long-held assumptions about Scotland’s musical history and demonstrates the resilience of cultural traditions, even through the upheavals of the Reformation. As co-author Dr James Cook explains, “For a long time, it was thought that pre-Reformation Scotland was a barren wasteland when it comes to sacred music. Our work shows there was a rich tradition of high-quality music-making in Scotland’s cathedrals, churches, and chapels, on par with anywhere else in Europe.”

Dr Newton-Jackson’s role as lead author of this project highlights the important work of Collegians in advancing global understanding of history and culture. Through the dedication of these researchers, a small but precious artifact of Scotland’s religious and musical past has been preserved, enriching our understanding of the period’s artistry and heritage.

A recording of the reconstructed piece (with Paul singing bass) can be heard here.