One of the most exciting things to happen in my lifetime – far more exciting than the fall of the Berlin Wall or the 1966 World Cup – has been the rediscovery of six centuries of totally forgotten music. And, just as importantly, the crucial evidence that tells us (in the lamentable absence of medieval CDs) how it would have been performed.

Until the mid-20th century nobody except academics knew anything of the music written before the Renaissance, and very little of the stuff written during that golden age. The flood-gates opened in the 1960s. A charismatic virtuoso called David Munrow – a Pied Piper figure who could pick up anything from a garden hosepipe to a comb and make merry music on it – suddenly opened our ears to the invigorating dances of medieval Europe. Sadly, he died in tragic circumstances, still in his prime. But by then the fuse was lit. A succession of brilliant scholar-performers, many of them British, started to bring to life dusty manuscripts full of glorious music – dating as far back as the dawn of notated sound, shortly after the Norman conquest.

Today, this fabulous array is lumped together as “early music”. That’s not only uninviting, it’s misleading. It doesn’t do justice to a range of music that extends from the haunting laments of the troubadours to courtly dances, and from sublime sacred pieces to splendidly filthy tavern songs. No wonder that the millions who visit soaring Gothic cathedrals, or crowd into galleries to gaze at great medieval paintings, are largely oblivious to the sublime sounds from the same era. They open their eyes to the past, but not their ears.

Perhaps that’s because they believe medieval and Renaissance music to be dry and dull. Nothing could be further than the truth. Much is joyous, foot-tappingly rhythmic, and often infuriatingly catchy. And those bizarre instruments! Luscious lutes, strident sackbuts, sinuous viols, tinkling dulcimers, mournful rebecs, bucolic hurdy-gurdies... to hear a Renaissance band in full swing is like walking into an exotic menagerie. What’s more, so much early music has now been recorded that you could listen to a different piece each day and still make the treasure trove last a lifetime.

Well, next weekend the treasure trove gets a good airing. The York Early Music Christmas Festival lasts only five days, but it packs in everything from 13th-century Mongolian song to Yiddish theatre music. There’s an airing of a brilliant film called The Full Monteverdi – a searing dramatisation of the 17th-century Italian’s madrigals – and a concert of bawdy “broadside ballads” from 17th-century England, wittily titled Have I Got News For Thee. From morn till midnight, York’s ancient churches and halls will ring to the sound of olde ayres.

But if you can’t make it to York, fear not. Early music festivals have sprung up across the country in recent years. Aficionados flock to them, but the music is too good to be confined to a ghetto. Taste one and see. You will be hooked.

York Early Music Christmas Festival (www.ncem.co.uk 01904 632220), Fri to Dec 10