-By Warner Todd Huston
For a non-politics related post… Researchers have found the oldest Polyphonic music ever written. A polyphonic song is music written for at least two vocal parts (today we often think of four parts with bass, tenor, alto, and soprano, for instance). Before this discovery, the earliest polyphonic piece researchers had discovered was from the year 1,000, but this one has been dated to the year 900.
Just listen to this, it is mesmerizing:
It was discovered by PhD student Giovanni Varelli jotted down by hand in a manuscript in the British Library. The music was written at the bottom of a page of a German manuscript that chronicled the life of St. Boniface, that country’s Patron Saint.
No one caught it before probably because the music was written in an archaic format that was used long before the normal musical stave system we use today was invented.
The piece in the video above is performed by Quintin Beer and John Clapham–both music undergraduates at St John’s College, Cambridge.
Here is what the manuscript looks like:
Looks like something J.R.R. Tolkien would write for his “Lord of the Rings” books, doesn’t it?
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, Wizbang.com, among many, many others. Huston has also appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, and many local TV shows as well as numerous talk radio shows throughout the country.
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