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A comment on Chance discovery casts new light on the origins of polyphonic music. Parent comment

Re:Chance discovery casts new light on the origins of polyph... by rbshadel on Thursday December 18, 2014 @12:05PM (#8768293)
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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Re:Chance discovery casts new light on the origins of polyph... by tdumitrescu on Thursday December 18, 2014 @12:45PM (#8768573)
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.
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Re:Chance discovery casts new light on the origins of polyph... by ars on Thursday December 18, 2014 @03:12PM (#8769394)
More about plainchant notation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neume
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