I'll be interested in seeing what Critter has to add, if anything. Meanwhile, I want to point of the extreme vaguenes of this assertion.

We have a tendency to compress places and times in the past, sometimes even to a single point--In this discussion people have used the terms "Medeval" and "Middle Ages", and those terms can cover anywhere from about the 9th Century to the 15th. Times as remote from each other as say, our time and the time of the Crusades.

People tend to to lump the differing musics of that great span of time together as well, music that spanned from unaccompanied voices, reed whistles and single stringed instruments, to orchestras with music and instruments more complex that those that we use today.

We even forget that, in the same times, the music from, say Flemish composers, might be totally unknown in Italy.

We live in a time of mass culture and standardization, and it is hard for us to understand that this is a recent innovation. In the past, when there was a decree that, say, the robes of the Virgin Mary should only be a certain color of blue, it must be remembered that that may have only been enforced in a certain city, for a certain number of weeks, months, or possibly years.