Seikilos epitaph
The Seikilos epitaph is the oldest surviving complete musical composition, including musical notation, from anywhere in the world. The epitaph has been variously dated, but seems to be either from the 1st or the 2nd century AD. The song, the melody of which is recorded, alongside its lyrics, in the ancient Greek musical notation, was found engraved on a tombstone (a stele) from the Hellenistic town Tralles near present-day Aydın, Turkey, not far from Ephesus. It is a Hellenistic Ionic song in either the Phrygian octave species or Iastian tonos. While older music with notation exists (for example the Hurrian songs), all of it is in fragments; the Seikilos epitaph is unique in that it is a complete, though short, composition.
Johann Erasmus Kindermann
Most of Kindermann's surviving works are vocal pieces that reflect the transition from older forms to the more modern use of concertato techniques and basso continuo and explore a variety of techniques from motets for choir without instruments to concertos for solo voices after Schütz's sectional concertos, recitative and dialogue experiments (some of which look up to late Baroque works - for example, by using unprepared dissonance in the recitative "Dum tot carminibus" for tenor and continuo). Some two hundred songs survive, on diverse texts: homophonic settings of brief poetic texts, songs for one or two voices and continuo with instrumental ritornellos, etc. Several manuscript pieces are important precursors to later church cantatas and belong to the earliest large-scale Nuremberg vocal music to have contrasting solo and choral movements.
Of the keyboard music, "Harmonia Organica" (1645) is the most important collection, not only in the musical sense but also in the history of music printing, as it is perhaps the earliest engraved German music. It consists of 25 contrapuntal pieces. The first fourteen are preludes, 15-20 measures long, with no imitative idiom present, each starting with all voices together. The first six cover all church modes (one prelude for both authentic and plagal modes); the next six repeat this series transposing it down a fifth. The rest of the pieces of the collection are titled "fuga": some are genuine fugues, others are based on chorale melodies and use them in a variety of ways, sometimes one phrase is answering another, other times the second phrase may be used for an interlude, etc. There is one remarkable triple fugue on chorale melodies, and an early example of chorale fugue (i.e. fugue on the first phrase of the chorale melody), a model which would later be extensively used by central German composers and, most importantly, Johann Pachelbel and J.S. Bach. The final piece of "Harmonia Organica" is a Magnificat setting, which begins and ends with a full-fledged improvisatory, free section. Different verses are treated differently: some as cantus firmus in one of the voices, one as a fugue, one as an echo, etc. Other surviving keyboard music by Kindermann includes a number of dances for the harpsichord.