A newly identified 9th-century manuscript leaf may contain some of the earliest known examples of written music in Western Europe — what experts are calling a rare witness to the very dawn of musical notation. The manuscript leaf is being offered on the public market for $80,000 US.
The discovery was made by Nathan Raab, president of The Raab Collection. He identified the notations on a vellum leaf from a liturgical book used during Mass — dating to the mid to late 800s. The marks appear above the word “[A]lleluja” in a choral refrain meant to be sung by the congregation. Previously overlooked or misunderstood by modern owners, the penstrokes and dots caught Raab’s attention and led him to months of research confirming their early musical character.
“This is an incredibly early witness to our modern use of musical notations at its very dawn,” Nathan says, “and its discovery is a further reminder to us in the business of historical discovery that sometimes those discoveries are hiding in plain sight.”
The Dawn of Written Music
Photo courtesy The Raab Collection
While music has been part of human culture for millennia, the written notation of melody was a medieval invention. In Western Europe, this transformation began in the late ninth and early tenth centuries, amid the reforms of the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne.
During this time, monks began adapting Byzantine ekphonetic notation and other accents into a system of penstrokes and dots called neumes, which guided singers by showing the general rise and fall of pitch. As Raab notes, the now-familiar musical stave came much later: “The musical stave establishing pitch was not invented until the 11th century, and then with only four lines, with full notation in polyphonic five-line staves only following in the second half of the 15th century.”
The newly identified leaf thus joins the earliest surviving examples of Western notation, such as the Laon Gradual (France) and the St. Gall Cantatorium (Switzerland), both dated to the same period.
A Leaf from a Carolingian Sacramentary
Photo courtesy The Raab Collection
The manuscript leaf comes from a Latin Sacramentary, likely written in Germany during the second half of the ninth century. The text covers Easter Day and Easter Monday, written in two columns of Carolingian minuscule, the elegant rounded script standard across medieval Europe. Measuring 322 by 220 mm, the vellum leaf was once reused in a later bookbinding — a fate common for medieval parchment — before its recovery and recognition as a significant early musical source.
A newly identified 9th-century manuscript leaf may contain some of the earliest known examples of written music in Western Europe — what experts are calling a rare witness to the very dawn of musical notation. The manuscript leaf is being offered on the public market for $80,000 US.
The discovery was made by Nathan Raab, president of The Raab Collection. He identified the notations on a vellum leaf from a liturgical book used during Mass — dating to the mid to late 800s. The marks appear above the word “[A]lleluja” in a choral refrain meant to be sung by the congregation. Previously overlooked or misunderstood by modern owners, the penstrokes and dots caught Raab’s attention and led him to months of research confirming their early musical character.
“This is an incredibly early witness to our modern use of musical notations at its very dawn,” Nathan says, “and its discovery is a further reminder to us in the business of historical discovery that sometimes those discoveries are hiding in plain sight.”
The Dawn of Written Music
While music has been part of human culture for millennia, the written notation of melody was a medieval invention. In Western Europe, this transformation began in the late ninth and early tenth centuries, amid the reforms of the Holy Roman Emperor Charlemagne.
During this time, monks began adapting Byzantine ekphonetic notation and other accents into a system of penstrokes and dots called neumes, which guided singers by showing the general rise and fall of pitch. As Raab notes, the now-familiar musical stave came much later: “The musical stave establishing pitch was not invented until the 11th century, and then with only four lines, with full notation in polyphonic five-line staves only following in the second half of the 15th century.”
The newly identified leaf thus joins the earliest surviving examples of Western notation, such as the Laon Gradual (France) and the St. Gall Cantatorium (Switzerland), both dated to the same period.
A Leaf from a Carolingian Sacramentary
The manuscript leaf comes from a Latin Sacramentary, likely written in Germany during the second half of the ninth century. The text covers Easter Day and Easter Monday, written in two columns of Carolingian minuscule, the elegant rounded script standard across medieval Europe. Measuring 322 by 220 mm, the vellum leaf was once reused in a later bookbinding — a fate common for medieval parchment — before its recovery and recognition as a significant early musical source.
If you want to know more about this leaf, or purchase it, please visit The Raab Collection website.
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