A New Polyphonic Source from Sixteenth-Century Scotland

This article discusses a new source of sacred polyphonic music from sixteenth-century Scotland, one which had remained hidden for more than five centuries as marginalia within a printed book. Despite containing only a small amount of music, this source can tell us a great deal about cultures of written and improvised liturgical music in pre-Reformation Scotland, a time and place from which very little notated music survives. The music in this source has no text, title, or attribution. However, we reveal the identity of the music as the tenor part of a faburden on the Office hymn Cultor Dei memento and we determine that it was most likely written down in Aberdeenshire, in the north-east of Scotland. Finally, by analysing the book’s non-musical annotations, we explore a series of likely owners of the book—and what it might have meant to own such an object—during the turbulent period in Scotland from the early sixteenth century to the late seventeenth.