What a novel idea! Under the aegis of Naxos producer Colin J. Rae and annotator Dean Brierly, here is a two-disc compilation dedicated to the works of the most prolific composer of all time: Anonymous. There are lots of reasons why musical works come down through history without attribution; in the earliest days of notation, sacred compositions themselves were viewed as being the result of a collective for a collective purpose, and it was rare for a composer -- or even a scribe -- to affix his or her name to such a ...
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What a novel idea! Under the aegis of Naxos producer Colin J. Rae and annotator Dean Brierly, here is a two-disc compilation dedicated to the works of the most prolific composer of all time: Anonymous. There are lots of reasons why musical works come down through history without attribution; in the earliest days of notation, sacred compositions themselves were viewed as being the result of a collective for a collective purpose, and it was rare for a composer -- or even a scribe -- to affix his or her name to such a production. As musical works became associated more definitively with the hands that crafted them, the names gradually began to appear, though it was a long process and Anonymous works are still relatively common into the seventeenth century; it took a long time for the cult of the composer in Western music to become truly established. Music publishing had an important effect on this development because it was discovered that a work attached to a composer's name -- particularly that of a...
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