It took her 14 years, but a Farmington woman has succeeded in her quest to resurrect and record music that had lain dormant for more than 400 years.

It was a journey with many stops and starts, but LeeAnn Tinker still beams when she talks about the moment when she first held her CD, “Music in Praise of God,” in her hands.

“I felt like bawling like a sick fish,” said Tinker, 48. “Standing in my kitchen, I thought, ‘Mom and Dad, I wish you were here to see this.'”

What Tinker has recorded are “Cantiones Duarum Vocum,” a set of 12 16th-century motets by Roland de Lassus, a Flemish composer. De Lassus worked in Naples, Rome and Antwerp before accepting a Bavarian court position and settling in Munich for the rest of his life.

The motets are modal music, written before the introduction of major and minor keys.

“There are two melody lines,” explained Tinker, a private music instructor and church music minister. “It’s one perfectly good tune on top, another perfectly good tune on the bottom. Put the two together, and you have magic.”

The motets were originally sung a cappella by men in Latin church services. So Tinker had some work to do even to play them on an instrument.

“I had to put it in a context that we could understand,” she said. “I had to get away from the language barrier and go straight to the music.”

Arranging such obscure music is a long way from Tinker’s start in music as a child country singer. Her parents, Glenwood and Anne Tinker, had a radio and stage show as The Two Kids From the Cabin. When 3-year-old LeeAnn was recruited, they became the Log Cabin Trio.

(Tinker’s parents found each other when her schoolteacher mother, homesick in Michigan, heard an AM broadcast from Lincoln, Neb., of her serviceman father singing “I Want To Be a Cowboy’s Sweetheart.” She wrote him, and they were married in 1945 after two years of corresponding.)

She was in country music as recently as 1992, playing guitar and singing as a member of The Old-Timers. Her mother had founded the group, and it broke up about six months after her mother’s death that year.

By that time, Tinker also was serving as the pianist and organist at St. Sebastian’s Catholic Church in Madison and the organist at St. Joseph’s in Farmington. It was in that latter capacity that she first became involved with de Lassus’ motets.

The priest at the church, Father Reginald Brissette, wanted instrumental music except during the opening and closing hymns and the acclamation.

Her search for such music began in 1985. Tinker, a self-taught organist, came upon three of the motets in an old sheet-music anthology and tried them out.

“It was different, not music that we would write today,” she said. “It grabbed me by the ears. That’s the sort of reaction one wants, whether on stage or in church. If we can get the ears, we can get the hearts.”

She had three, but wondered where the other nine motets were. The next year, while working on her master’s degree at the University of Maine, she stopped in Fogler Library, They located four places in the country that had sheet music for the motets.

She could borrow them for 10 days. She got a handful of Itoya Sherbet pens and used a different color for each motet arrangement, ending up with more than 40 pages.

“I handcrafted musical arrangements that I could play and make sense of,” she recalled. “I checked and rechecked, and was extremely fussy with it. I would start over if I made a mistake.”

Tinker played the motets at St. Joseph’s until 1989, when Father Brissette was transferred. Changes at the church included eliminating the organ in favor of a clavinova. So she put the musical pieces away.

Then, in 1996, Tinker began to wonder how the motets would work on an electronic keyboard.

“They fit even better than on organ,” she said.

A student heard her play and encouraged her to record them. She felt confident, and decided to give it a try.

“(The music) made the hair stand up on my arm,” she said. “People don’t react to music in a vacuum. If it appeals to one, it can appeal to many.”

Tinker set up a card table and on it placed a tape recorder that the student leant to her, patching it into her ’92 Yamaha PSR-4600 keyboard. She recorded many nights into the early morning hours. She finished her masters of the motets in 1996, then put them away again.

In the summer of 1998, she called the University of Maine music department, and was referred to John Dyer of Unintentional Studios. She sent the tape to Dyer, but didn’t hear from him until February of the next year. It seems that she sent the master tape in an old check box, and Dyer had misfiled it with some checks, rediscovering it six months later.

Despite the large number of artists he works with, Dyer remembered Tinker, although the two never met.

“It was an interesting project,” he said. “I took her masters on a cassette, ran it through noise-reduction and restoration, and produced the CD for her.”

The hardest part of the process for Tinker was writing the sleeve notes to go on the back of the CD cover.

“My 75-page master’s paper took less out of me than these sleeve notes,” she said with a laugh.

She received the CDs in February of last year. After St. Joseph’s used the CD as a fund-raiser for a month, it was stocked in stores around the state.

One of her first reviews came from Father Brissette, who wrote, “This music is ideal for meditation and reflection. Listening to it renews and refreshes me.”

Ironically, Tinker can’t listen to her own release because she doesn’t own a CD player.

“I’ve got 78, 45 and 33? records, cassettes and reel-to-reel tapes,” she said. “Why would I want to amass another form of technology?”

It took 14 years, but Tinker finally captured de Lassus’ motets for posterity. Why was it important for her to do that?

“It’s part of our musical heritage,” she said. “It represents an important stage in the development of music. We must keep track of that, just as we keep track of the world’s history.”

“Music in Praise of God” is available at Everyday Music in Farmington; Bull Moose in Waterville; Little House of Prayer in Biddeford; St. Paul Center and Barnes and Noble in Augusta, Bible Bookstore in Auburn, Maine Sampler in Kingfield, the University of Maine Bookstore in Orono, and Borders in Bangor or at cdfreedom.com.