A team of researchers in Pennsylvania has discovered what they regard as some of the first written notes in western musical history, apparently lost and found on a ninth-century manuscript that they have discovered had long been in the possession of a private collector, hidden in plain view, as they say.

The characters and dots, like shorthand outlines, are written above the word alleluia on the sheet of vellum, part of a Latin sacramentary, a Catholic liturgical book (used during a mass in western Europe in the mid- to late-800s).

Although there are earlier written forms of the music notes of ancient times, such as the Hymn to Nikkal of 1400-1200BC, carved in clay tablets, the researchers claim that the sacramentary markings are one of the first known to describe the birth of modern Western music.

Historian and author Nathan Raab, who is the president of the Raab Collection, found them during the assessment of the document offered to him by the personal owner. Raab thinks the notations had in the past been ignored or misinterpreted, and the researcher claimed to have spent months researching their origin and meaning.

It is a witness indeed to our modern use of musical notations in a cruelly primordial state, and its discovery offers us once again that reminder of our own in the business of historical discovery, that occasionally they are there in plain sight.

Raab dated the document as having been created in Germany during the second half of the ninth century, and the text is of Easter services. Notation marks, inflections, and accents over the words symbolize the instructions on how the pitch should be raised and lowered as a visual help to the singer.

Musical notations in Western music include the oldest surviving examples of Laon Gradual, the Gregorian chant, in the manuscript of the Laon Gradual in the municipal library, Laon, France, and the Cantatorium of St Gall in the abbey library at Saint Gallen, Switzerland, both of the late ninth or early 10th centuries.

Raab claimed that the medieval document he held was worth $80,000, but it might be even older. “Nor is there, as far as I can discover, any prior document, whatever, in any private library or in the private market,” he said.

“Although music has been with human civilization since the beginning of humankind, the written form of music has not,” as a press release about the discovery outlines.

It is one of the oldest records of the notation of music in the West, with the Laon Gradual and with the St Gall cantatorium at its earliest possible date.