Chance discovery casts new light on the origins of polyphonic music | Hacker News Reader

Chance discovery casts new light on the origins of polyphonic music

theguardian.com

54 pointsk4jh7 comments

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.

Slightly more information at the site of St. John's College, Cambridge: http://www.joh.cam.ac.uk/earliest-known-piece-polyphonic-mus...

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."

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%... with a modern transcription at http://www.cam.ac.uk/sites/www.cam.ac.uk/files/inner-images/...). 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.

More about plainchant notation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neume

I thought so at first, too, but I think the music is a different piece about Boniface? "The scrap of music, which would have lasted no more than a few seconds"

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#...

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