![]() You can hear the chant “I See Heaven Open” from that work in this YouTube video, performed by Ensemble Scholastica: ![]() Prior to the discovery of this manuscript, the earliest known polyphonic piece was the Winchester Troper, written around 1,000 A.D. “We are delighted that Giovanni Varelli has been able to decipher them and understand their importance to the history of music,” Bell said. ![]() He said when librarians cataloged the manuscript in the 1700s, they didn’t understand the musical notations. Nicholas Bell, the musical curator at the British Library, said the discovery is exciting and important to understanding the early history of European music. "The rules being applied here laid the foundations for those that developed and governed the majority of western music history for the next thousand years,” Varelli said. Varelli told Cambridge Research News that the piece shows music was in a state of flux then, and the conventions may have been less rules to be followed and more starting points to explore new compositional paths. But the composer of this earliest known polyphonic piece is already breaking rules. Musicologists think of polyphonic music as somewhat rigid and set in specific patterns. “This suggests that even at this embryonic stage, composers were experimenting with form and breaking the rules of polyphony almost at the same time as they were being written,” Cambridge Research News writes. The piece just discovered is significant not just for its early date but also because it is different than music described in treatises from that time, Cambridge Research News says. He believes this because there is a notation “which is celebrated on December 1,” a reference to the Feast Day for Maternianus, which some German clerics of that time and locale celebrated the first of December. Varelli is unsure in which monastery the piece was written but speculates it may have been from around northwest Germany. ![]() The piece Varelli brought to light is an organum, or plainsong in which accompaniment is above or below the melody. The notation does not include a musical staff, which hadn’t even been invented by the early 10 th century. The composer wrote the music into a space at the end of a manuscript describing the life of Bishop Maternianus of Reims, France. John’s College undergraduates Quintin Beer and John Clapham performing the early 10 th century piece, known as an organum: He specializes in early musical notation and was struck by the fact that piece consisted of two complementing vocal parts. John’s College doing an internship at the British Library, came across the manuscript by chance. Giovnanni Varelli, a Cambridge University Ph.D candidate in St. This piece is a short chant of the type dedicated to St. Poly is a Greek word that means many or more than one, and phonic or phone means sound. Polyphonic music pieces include more than one independent melody. Though polyphony ruled European music until the 20 th century, experts are unsure when it emerged. Polyphonic music laid the foundation for later European music, says the University of Cambridge Research News. ![]() An intern has discovered a beautiful inscription of the earliest known piece of polyphonic music, a choral piece written for two vocal parts, in a British Library manuscript dating from about 900 A.D. ![]()
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