One of the Earliest Known Musical Notations from Western Europe Uncovered

The Raab Collection has announced the discovery of perhaps the earliest known written examples of modern musical notations from Western Europe on a vellum manuscript leaf from a Latin Sacramentary.

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 Hunt for History. 

Raab discovered the musical notes on a vellum manuscript leaf from an early 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 research into their origin and use. 

The text is a Temporale for Easter Day and Easter Monday, most likely created in Germany in the second half of the 9th century. The leaf is 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. 

Music's written form appears to have emerged in the late 9th and early 10th centuries 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 singers by marking the general rising and falling of pitch and other audible features.

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.