Earliest Western musical notations uncovered in Pennsylvania

29 October 2025

The ninth-century Latin manuscript. Photograph: The Raab Collection

In an unexpected twist of history one of the most delicate yet profound revelations in the story of Western music has come from a private collection in Pennsylvania. A leaf from a ninth-century Latin sacramentary has turned up not just as a relic of the devotional rites of the early Middle Ages but as a key to rethinking when and how music took visible form. The vellum page includes tiny symbols dots and shorthand-like marks poised above the word “alleluia” that appear to map the rise and fall of pitch in the chant.

According to the historian and collector Nathan Raab the document likely originated in Germany during the second half of the ninth century and survived centuries of obscurity in private hands before raising its head in scholarly light. Raab says he spent months researching the marks and correlating them with the earliest known comparable manuscripts. The price tag quoted on the piece-on-the-market is around $80 000.

What makes this find compelling is its context. The oldest widely-known manuscripts of Gregorian chant notation are works such as the Laon Gradual housed in Laon, France, and the Cantatorium of St Gall in the Swiss abbey of Saint Gallen, each dating from the ninth or early tenth century. This newly identified leaf may precede both of them, suggesting that the ability to capture music on the page was under way earlier than conventionally credited.

The markings themselves are rudimentary by modern standards: little inked swipes, dots perched above letters, and clusters of miniscule ticks that signal changes in pitch to a singer accustomed to following melodic tradition by ear. In effect they are an early mnemonic aid allowing the voice to navigate the melody without the singer requiring full notation as later medieval manuscripts would supply. That shift where melody becomes visible was a revolutionary step in the history of Western musical culture.

Raab says the document was previously misidentified or simply not inspected for the kind of signs that would mark it as significant. He adds that its survival in a private hands highlights how many historical artefacts remain hidden or simply overlooked in collections not open to academic scrutiny. “This is an incredibly early witness to our modern use of musical notations at its very dawn,” he says of the fragment.

Beyond its technical significance, the find prompts a reconsideration of the story of notation itself. We tend to think of musical score technology as something that emerged distinctly in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, but this fragment points to a very gradual evolution of visual-aids to the voice in the liturgical context. It underscores that singers and scribes of the early Middle Ages were already experimenting with notation and that the story of how music was preserved and transmitted needs revisiting.

In a broader cultural sense the discovery reminds us that musical heritage is not only what we hear but what we can see. The tokens above letters on that old leaf tie the human voice to the written page. They point to a moment when melody left the oral domain and moved into the geometric space of the page. That interface between sight and sound is one of the defining changes in music history.

What this means for scholars is both immediate and open-ended. On one hand the artifact adds a new data point to the lineage of notation; on the other it is a call to search deeper in private and lesser-known collections. The fragment hints that the story of how music notation developed is richer and more tangled than textbooks suggest. As Raab and others sift the fragment’s ink inscriptions they are mapping not just a melody but a moment when singers and scribes reached for permanence in their art.

While the political divisions of modern Pennsylvania may have nothing to do with ninth-century German monks and their Easter chants the terrain of discovery has found a strangely local anchoring. A piece of Western musical history resting quietly before now in a collector’s archive is now stepping into public view and asking what else remains unnoticed.