I live in the 16th at Paris and a new symphony was created in Vienna. How can I hear it and know about it?
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Like another person said, symphonies didn’t exist yet. Keep in mind that a symphony is a specific type of formally structured, abstract instrumental music. It was developed in the 18th century to go along with a comparatively large group of instruments. (The composer David Bruce has a good summary [here](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tNsZA6q8yH8) about how we ended up with the standard symphony orchestra looking the way it does.)
The most common type of music in the middle ages were songs and dances, although there were also several formal types of vocal music (plainchant, organum, polyphonic masses) intended for religious purposes.
Many people learned music from others by ear. You’d hear a song that somebody else played or sang and figured out how to play or sing it yourself. Churches taught people how to sing religious songs; they developed the solfege system (calling the notes do, re, mi, etc) during the middle ages as a way to talk about the sounds in a song.
There were traveling musicians. Rich members of the nobility would also act as patrons to musicians.
But some people also wrote down words to songs, and there were types of written music notation that developed over the centuries. Not just the kind of notation that most of us are familiar with today (where the little note symbols indicate the sound), but tablature for instruments like organ or lute (with symbols that indicate how to play the instrument).
We have some surviving handwritten songbooks which originally belonged to wealthy people or churches. The [Llibre Vermell de Montserrat](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Llibre_Vermell_de_Montserrat) and [Chansonnier du Roi](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chansonnier_du_Roi) are a couple of famous examples. Music of some composers did travel suprisingly far, but it’s less surprising when you realize that some of the elite composers worked for the Pope or the Holy Roman Emperor. (Royal courts all across Europe started interacting more over the centuries and tried to outdo each other by employing more artists and musicians.)
Once printing technology developed in Europe, it was easy to print the words to a song but harder to print the music. So in the 16th century you could probably buy a paper copy of a [broadside ballad](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Broadside_ballad) for pretty cheaply that had all the words to a song, but you still had to learn the tune from somebody.
Petrucci published the famous compilation [Harmonice Musices Odhecaton](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harmonice_Musices_Odhecaton) in 1501, but his method took a three-pass process to get each page printed so it was initially very expensive. By the middle of the 16th century, several other publishers across Europe (including Pierre Phalese, Tielman Susato, and Pierre Attaignant) were printing music with a cheaper process and they sold collections of song and dance music.
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