The "Carmina Burana" (Burana Songs) made famous when Carl Orff set them for chorus in the 1930s were a group of medieval Latin secular poems, some of them of a romantic or senusal nature. They were so called by a nineteenth-century German editor who published the texts after the manuscript was found at the Benediktbeuren monastery near Munich; ("Burana" is a Latinization of the German "Beuren"). Orff's music was original, but some of the songs were accompanied by a primitive kind of notation that showed the profile of small musical phrases but not their relative ranges. Modern editors, aided by versions of some of the songs that appear in other manuscripts in more precisely notated form, have reconstructed the music for many of them—with the result that listeners interested in hearing the "originals" of Orff's songs can now purchase a recorded approximation.

© All Music Guide, Rovi