If musical practice etymology is your penchant then a new discovery has left some scholars floored. A few lines of music scribed on an old painting has revealed, possibly, the earliest example of polyphonic choral music, where voices sing different melodies combining to make a singular composition.
The short musical phrase, though, would have lasted no more than a few seconds and was written on the bottom of a portrait of a saint. A PhD student at the British library, Giovanni Varelli, happened on the transcription by chance.
Varelli specializes in early music notation, so the discovery may have only come from a scholar such as Varelli. Thus, according to The Guardian, the significance of was "missed by other scholars because the notation, which pre-dates the invention of the stave, is hard to read for non-specialists."
Of course, the piece was written for religious practice and is believed to date back to 900 A.D. The style of notation, too, is indicative of northwest Germany.
Varelli was also noted that the piece was breaking the foundation for musical notation as well. He was quoted as saying: "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."
"This discovery shows how they were evolving, and how they existed in a constant state of transformation, around the year 900," he concluded.
A unique discovery, indeed, here's an idea of what the piece would have sounded like below.
