It can be humorously stated that Anonymous was the most long-lived and prolific composer of Western music. Virtually all chant and much early polyphony was created by anonymous composers, as was much medieval secular music. There are a multitude of reasons for this; taken together they can help us paint something of a portrait of this most enigmatic of "composers."

The anonymous chant composers may not have been composers at all, at least not in the modern sense. Most of what we know as "Gregorian Chant" was not written down until probably the ninth century. Before that, it existed as an oral art, passed from one musician to another. In the earliest traditions it was probably the result not of composition, but improvisation. By the time it was written down, it was far removed from what its original creators had first sung. Yet it had attained a place of authority that was further raised by the legend that it had been created by Pope Gregory I (who was pope from 590 to 604). A fanciful impossibility, but one of the West's first acts of musical authorship.

By the tenth century, we can point to new sacred compositions by musicians who wished their names to be attached to their works, something of a novelty. Interestingly enough, one of these early authors was a woman, Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179), who went to the trouble of having all the music that she had written compiled into manuscripts. This was still somewhat unusual. Even with the birth of polyphony in the tenth century, we find few pieces with names of authors attached to them. Two of the most famous, Léonin and Pérotin (both of whom worked in the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris at the end of the twelfth and beginning of the thirteenth centuries) are known because of a later writer's discussion of their music. It wasn't, in fact, until the fourteenth century that we begin to find a reliable accounting of musical authorship in sacred music -- though until the seventeenth century, exact authorship is often open to question due to careless scribes or unscrupulous publishers.

In the realm of secular music, the situation is similar, and indeed, much of the music that would have been created does not survive because it was never written down. This changed in the courts of France starting in the twelfth century. Here, the aristocracy themselves, male and female, were the creators and performers in the rich tradition of the troubadours and trouvères. Not surprisingly, since this was music about, for, and even by the rich and powerful, it was carefully collected and notated, often with short biographies of the composers. Ironically, by the sixteenth century, the creation of music was seen as a profession, and beneath the dignity of the nobility. Because of this, a nobleman or noblewoman would usually not have taken credit for his or her creations and it may be that some of the anonymous music of this period is by aristocratic amateurs.

In short, anonymous composers were men and women, highborn and low, but they were different people at different times, reflecting society's changing feelings about authorship and the act of creation. It is worth remembering that anonymity was not always an accident of history. It was usually a reflection of the society in which the music was created.