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gwern comments on Making History Available - Less Wrong
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Hm, could this be due to a difference in composition writing and publishing practices? That is, did older European compositions survive longer because they were copied more frequently, or (somewhat equivalently) were easier to copy for some reason?
I think much of it may just be relative age combined with poorly developed notation. The golden age of Chinese music was much further back than the golden age of European music - easier to survive 500 years than 2000.
(I don't think Murray draws the connection, but he discusses problems with ranking Greek music: the surviving music tends to simplistic melodies by a single instrument, distinctly unimpressive - yet writers like Plato describe music as one of the most powerful forces in society. Either Plato et al had very low musical standards or what has survived is extremely incomplete/unrepresentative.)