MIDDLE AGE MUSICAL INSTRUMENTS - XAVIER TERRASA

The repertoire of the Middle Ages - 5th to 15th century, sometimes familiar to our ears, is the foundation of our Western musical heritage. It was built according to the successive inventions of theorists and musicians. Limited by the available sources, it is nevertheless surprisingly rich and very diverse. But, from this distant Middle Ages, no complete musical instrument has come down to us prior to the 15th century.
To reconstruct the medieval instrumentarium, archaeomusicologists had to resort to several disciplines: archeology, iconographic research in illumination, painting, stained glass, sculpture ..., medieval literature, the history of techniques, musicology as well as the history of the Middle Ages to understand in which “world” these instruments were played.