Winchester Troper

The first source of Anglo-Saxon music then is the laughably named Winchester Troper. It's not actually one book, but two completely unrelated books. For some reason the two books were split up and now one is at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. The other manuscript is in the Bodleian Library in Oxford. 

The Cambridge book dates from around 1020-30ad, it contains between 330 and 360 pieces of music. 174 of the pieces are Organum an early form of polyphony, the rest of the tune are monophonic. The book contains the largest number of polyphonic songs from the 11th centuury in Europe. 

The Oxford Book was written around 1050ad but was copied from an earlier book dating to the early 900s. This book contains 380 to 420 pieces of music. All the music is monophonic.

All the songs in both books are Plainchant (Gregorian Chant), except the Organum ones.  They would have been sung by the monks at the old minster at Winchester. 

The earliest form of music notations is known as neumes, which tell the singers the melody to sing. There are many neumes systems, some we know how to read and some we don't. The music notation written in the books is called adiastematic neumes, a form totally unique to these two books and highly complex, so for a long time the books were considered unreadable. However very recently a Cambridge team has decoded some of the melodies (the polyphonic ones of course).

Images

A song from the Cambridge book and my interpretation