Part of a 9th-Century Religious Manuscript, Never Before Recognized as Musical Notes
For Sale at Raab for $80,000
The Raab Collection announced today a major musical discovery: musical notations from the dawn of their use, perhaps the earliest known written examples of what we today consider modern music, from Western Europe. None earlier are known to exist in any private collection or to have reached the public market. The medieval manuscript leaf bearing these notations is valued at $80,000.
“This is an incredibly early witness to our modern use of musical notations at its very dawn, and its discovery is a further reminder to us in the business of historical discovery that sometimes those discoveries are hiding in plain sight,” said Nathan Raab, president of The Raab Collection and author of the bestselling book, The Hunt for History.
Nathan Raab discovered the musical notes on a vellum manuscript leaf from a Latin Sacramentary, a liturgical book used during Mass, dating to the mid to late 800s. The penstrokes and dots above the word “[A]lleluja” in a choral refrain to be sung by the congregation, which were overlooked or misunderstood by previous modern owners, prompted Raab to acquire the leaf and undertake months of research into their origin and use.
The Dawn of Modern Music
While music has been a constant of human culture, its written form has not. In Western Europe its absolute dawn appears to be the late 9th and early 10th centuries, and came about as part of the changes to religious music prompted by the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne.
In the late 9th century, monks adopted Byzantine ekphonetic notation marks and other inflections and accents to form a series of penstrokes and simple shapes (called neumes), that when written above words could help by marking the general rising and falling of pitch and other audible features. These functioned as a visual aid to the singer. (The musical stave establishing pitch was not invented until the 11th century, and then with only 4 lines, with full notation in polyphonic 5-line staves only following in the second half of the 15th century.)
Until now, the earliest surviving examples of musical notations in Western music have been found in The Laon Gradual at the Laon Bibliothèque municipale in France and in the St. Gall Cantatorium at Stiftsbibliothek St. Gallen in Switzerland, both dated to the late ninth or early 10th centuries. This newly discovered Sacramentary leaf stands among the very earliest witnesses to the notation of music in the West, alongside the Laon Gradual and the St. Gall Cantatorium at its very earliest possible dating.
The Manuscript Leaf
This medieval manuscript leaf comes from an early Sacramentary, in Latin on vellum, the text a Temporale for Easter Day and Easter Monday. It was most likely created in Germany in the second half of the 9th century.
The leaf measures 322 by 220 mm, blind-ruled for two columns of 33 lines, written in two sizes of a large and rounded script called Carolingian minuscule, the standard in medieval Europe. At some point in its long history, the leaf was reused in a bookbinding, from which it was recovered.
A full description and a note on the leaf’s provenance is here: Medieval Manuscript Earliest Known Musical Notations | Raab.
To learn more about this remarkable discovery, Nathan Raab is available for interviews. A brief audio interview is also available on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.
