The source basis for six studies by: E. Witkowska-Zaremba, N. Albarosa, J. Szandrei, T. Maciejewski, P. Gancarczyk and E. Zwolińska - the manuscripts kept in Polish collections from the eleventh to the sixteenth century , containing records of vocal music prepared for practical purposes, as well as theoretical treatises, of which diagrams used to conceptualize musical phenomena were an integral part. The musical notation of the manuscripts studied is basically within the framework of notation systems known from Western European sources. These systems, however, allowed a certain margin of freedom, tolerating the presence of specific features that give certain messages a unique character. The authors of this volume devoted special attention to these features, thus determining one of the main centers of gravity of the research. The second point of this kind concerns the connections between musical notation and theoretical concepts, compositional procedure and performance practice. The facsimilia presented in this volume are part of the photographic documentation kept as the designed research was carried out. They are merely a crumb of the richness of the cyrographic music culture in Poland, the richness resulting not only from the graphic form and decorativeness, but - more importantly - from the fact of the simultaneous occurrence of various ways of recording music, sometimes in one and the same code, and from a kind of anachrony consisting of coexistence of notation systems - from the point of view of modern musical historiography - centuries apart.
