How Much Anglo Saxon Music Survives?

A lot...

If I'd been asked this question many years ago I would have answered none, a few years ago much less than I know now, and most likely in a few years I will learn of even more. One thing about medieval music is its neither well publicised nor well studied. 

Music usually consists of three components: the melody (what the singer sings) the music, and the lyrics... Though with many songs, the melody and the music are the same. 

For example... If you listen to the Black Sabbath song Iron Man, Tony Iommi will play the main guitar riff and Ozzie Ozbourne will match it identically with his singing, note for note. On the other hand if you listen to their song Die Young, the music the band is playing is completely different to the melody Ronnie James Dio is singing.

The vast majority of medival music that survives, survives as lyrics only, we have no idea how they were sung. Second most we have lyrics and Melody surviving but no music. Next we have music surviving, but with no music or melodies, often these are instrumental dances. For all three components of a song to survive is rare.

Also medieval can be split into categories, these being mainly religious music and secular, the overwhealming amount of music that survives is religious music. 

Another major division is monophonic and polyphonic, monophonic is where all the singers and musicians play/sing exactly the same melody and polyphonic is where multiple different melodies are played at the same time. All music in the world is monophonic, with one exception, from the 8th century onwards European music began to develop polyphony. This means also all reasearch into medival music concerntrates on the small number of proto-polyphonic and polyphonic medieval songs, largely ignoring the huge corpus of monophonic ones

It with the above in mind we begin our seach for Anglo-Saxon Music.