The mostly fragmentary survival of medieval music manuscripts is re-viewed against the contrast between a romanticisation of fragments, ruins and unfinished work, and the utilitarian discarding of obsolete materials for recycling, notably music on parchment. Besides accidents of fire and flood, and politically or religiously motivated iconoclasm, peak periods for deliberate destruction were the advent of printing in the 16th century, creating a demand for parchment by bookbinders, and the 19th-century habit of dismembering manuscripts for their initials, with a related cult of forgery.