

Chance discovery casts new light on the origins of polyphonic music - k4jh
http://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/dec/17/polyphonic-music-fragment-origins-rewritten

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tokenadult
Thanks for submitting a thorough journalistic source for this bit of news,
which I saw as a brief submission from a news aggregation service in the
Facebook feeds of some of my friends. I'm especially impressed that this story
includes a video of two university music students actually singing the newly
discovered composition. The commentary in the article is quite interesting for
the details it describes of the development of polyphonic music in the West.

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rbshadel
My first hope was that the video was actually a performance of the discovered
sheet music, but is that actually correct? The video is amount a minute in
duration but according to the article, "The scrap of music...would have lasted
no more than a few seconds."

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tdumitrescu
The description of it as "lasting no more than a few seconds" is inaccurate,
as shown by the notation (at
[http://www.joh.cam.ac.uk/sites/default/files/images/Varelli%...](http://www.joh.cam.ac.uk/sites/default/files/images/Varelli%20detail%20crop.jpg)
with a modern transcription at
[http://www.cam.ac.uk/sites/www.cam.ac.uk/files/inner-
images/...](http://www.cam.ac.uk/sites/www.cam.ac.uk/files/inner-
images/modern_notation_0.jpg)). The first two texted lines "Sancte bonifati
... digneris" with the points and squiggles right above the words are typical
plainchant notation as found in a lot of early manuscripts (pre-diastemmatic,
not staff notation); while the two textless lines up top which look more like
modern notes are the 'accompaniment' to that plainchant. FWIW those two top
lines look nothing like other notation from that period.

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ars
More about plainchant notation:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neume](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neume)

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gnodar
I think it's important to note that this is article references the origin of
polyphonic music, as it relates to the western church. Polyphonic music as a
whole goes back much further than AD900, and even christianity itself. E.g:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_of_Georgia_%28country%29#...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_of_Georgia_%28country%29#Traditional_vocal_polyphony)

