[afraidfortherepublic]

Thanks for the ping on this. I'm sending this article to my daughter who has a couple of music degrees.

Every Sunday I check the credits on the hymns we sing and note that very seldom do we sing something older than 1850. I often wonder what has happened to all the early music and why we don't use it any more?

My definition of "early" is before 1600. I know it was written down...???

And to add another mystery...what has happened to all the music that was played and sung BEFORE it was written down? Is it lost to our collective memories?

[SunkenCiv]

There were different systems of notation, including some devised since, and parallel to, what we use today. They've just not survived. When I was a kid, someone found an inscription that wasn't in a (known) language, and the researcher involved interpreted it as a musical score, intuited how it may have been notated, and someone performed it.

Music styles change, tastes change. Also, stuff just gets misplaced. Antoine Brumel (15th-16th century, ecclesiastical composer) has a number of surviving works, but the one considered his masterpiece only survived in fragments. In the late 1980s, a very large lost fragment was found between the pages of some old book in Denmark (!) and reunited with the parts that had not been lost. A little remained to be found, but the modern arranger made up something, and the entire work (with the modern bridge) was performed for the first time in perhaps 400 years.

I read about it fifteen years or so ago, had to special order it, and it's easily one of my favorite CDs. There's a new, remastered version of the recording now, plus it has been recorded by at least one other ensemble.

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Antoine Brumel: Missa 'Et ecce terrae motus' and Sequentia 'Dies irae, Dies illa' by Huelgas Ensemble

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