Lotos Lab

The Imaginary Song Hunt

Music EN ↓ 5 episodes

Gather every Wednesday to rummage through music history’s wondrous, mystical, and neglected corners, unearthing forgotten stories, strange texts, and enchanted fragments of song with Stef Conner. The Imaginary Song Hunt is a monthly adventure into the lost, half-remembered, and beautifully mysterious corners of music history. Much of the music we explore survives only in fragments – cryptic manuscripts, patchy evidence, inherited traditions, and folklore. We often can’t know exactly how the old songs sounded… but it’s great fun to make an educated, imaginative guess. That’s what the Hunt is al...

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Lotos Lab

Episodes

How Did Christians Sing 1,700 Years Ago? – with Stefan Hagel and Anastasios Vasilopoulos (ISH 5, July 2026) 01.07.2026 38:11

The Imaginary Song Hunt, Episode 5, July 2026 This episode of Imaginary Song Hunt is on the trail of the amazing but very fragmentary papyrus containing the oldest Christian hymn for which a melody survives. We chatted with Stefan Hagel (Austrian Academy of Sciences), to try to get to grips with the historical evidence and interpretation of the ancient text, and to Anastasios Vasilopoulos (a Greek...

Could you sing like Sappho – with Ian Rutherford (ISH 4, June 2026) 03.06.2026 55:04

In this episode of Imaginary Song Hunt, we learn about the life and music of Sappho with Reading University’s Professor of Greek, Ian Rutherford. Who was Sappho and where do we find the details of her biography? What is a Sapphic Stanza and how should we sing it? Did people dance to Sappho’s music? We tackle all these questions and more in this exploration of history, poetry and rhythm. By the end...

Singing Canntaireachd – with Barnaby Brown (ISH 3, May 2026) 08.05.2026 1:05:28

In this episode of the Imaginary Song Hunt, we go hunting for Scottish Canntaireachd – the practice of singing Pibroch (the musical tradition of the Great Highland Bagpipe). Piping maestro, Lotos Lab’s own Barnaby Brown guides us through the murky undergrowth of Scottish bagpiping history, and explains how pipers have traditionally learned their craft through singing. After delving into cultural h...

Forging Charlemagne's Songbook – with James Freeman (ISH 2, April 2026) 22.04.2026 1:05:08

In this episode of Imaginary Song Hunt, we continue our search for a lost songbook from the court of Charlemagne. Medievalist and codicologist James Freeman joins us to explore a deceptively simple question: if this legendary book of barbara et antiquissima carmina (“ancient vernacular songs”) once existed, what would it actually take to reconstruct – or even convincingly fake – it? Shifting focus...

The Lost Songs of Charlemagne – with Benjamin Bagby (ISH 1, April 2026) 01.04.2026 58:05

Most of the songs people have ever sung are lost... In this episode of Imaginary Song Hunt, we go looking for one of the most tantalising missing sources of all: a lost songbook from the court of Charlemagne. We asked medieval music performer Benjamin Bagby (Sequentia, Beowulf) a simple question: "what’s the source you most wish existed, but doesn’t?" His answer was irresistible — a lost book of b...