The Imaginary Song Hunt

This month's Imaginary Song Hunt is a little bit spooky (happy Halloween!)... We're on the trail of ancient tablets that hold intriguing curses and charms. We spoke to Charlotte Spence – lecturer in ancient history at St Hilda's College, Oxford and expert in ancient curse tablets. Thousands of (mostly lead) tablets survive from across Europe, dating from as early as the 6th century through the end...

This Imaginary Song Hunt continues our trail through the music of one of history's most extraordinary composers: Hildegard von Bingen. This is Part 2 of 2.  Continuing our conversation with Jasmina Črnčič, we go deeper into the technical side of singing Hildegard's music. Jasmina walks us through her working process, starting with a piece's range, then reducing a melismatic line to its syllabic "s...

This Imaginary Song Hunt is on the trail of one of the most extraordinary composers in music history: Hildegard von Bingen. We spoke to Jasmina Črnčič, a singer who specialises in singing the music of Hildegard, to learn about Hildegard's life and music. We hear about Hildegard's early life in a monastery, how she later became the abbess of her own convent and was something of a polymath. On top o...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...