Typesetting Sheet Music

[printsmurf]

In 1501, Ottaviano Petrucci published Harmonice Musices Odhecaton. This was the first book of sheet music printed using movable type.

Using a system that printed staves, text and notes in three successive steps. The results were clean and elegant, but the process was too long and difficult – precisely aligning the three required great skill – for large-scale reproduction.


Ottaviano Petrucci, Harmonice Musices Odhecaton, 1501.

Around 1520 in England, John Rastell developed a single-impression method for printing music. With his method, the staff lines, words and notes were all part of a single piece of type, making it much easier to produce.

However, this method produced messier results, as the staff lines were often inexactly aligned and looked wavy on the page.

The single-impression method eventually triumphed over Petrucci's and became the dominant mode of printing until copper-plate engraving took over in the 17th century.

[printsmurf]

This is an extremely interesting website with detailed information and images of metal type used for printing music.

https://musicprintinghistory.org/

[printsmurf]

Excerpt from 'Music Book Printing'    F.H. Gilson Company, Boston, Mass. 1915

[anatolewilson]

I really like this printing, so detailed.

[Ehm.gee]

Thank you for sharing!  I've always wondered about this!

[Charles Holden]

This is great information that I am glad to be enlightened to. Thank you for sharing in our history of letterpress printing. I knew it was costly to do sheet music but no idea of the steps and labor involved.

[stafford]

Apart from setting type there was another way, and a set of punches to do it are now somewhere in the St Brides Foundation Library collection.

They came from The Curwen Press, and how they got to St. Brides is a mystery that will never be revealed! (probably)

[Dave Hughes]

They came from The Curwen Press, and how they got to St. Brides is a mystery that will never be revealed! (probably)

Sounds intriguing 
 

[printsmurf]

Apart from setting type there was another way, and a set of punches to do it are now somewhere in the St Brides Foundation Library collection.

They came from The Curwen Press, and how they got to St. Brides is a mystery that will never be revealed! (probably)

Using the link https://musicprintinghistory.org/about-music-engraving/ will take you to the Music Engraving page of the MUSIC PRINTING HISORY website where Punching Notes On The Printing Plate is explained

[printsmurf]

Probably the earliest example of printed notation occurs in Jean Charlier de Gerson's "Collectorium super Magnificat" printed by Conrad Fyner at Esslingen in 1473.

This work contains a music illustration consisting of five printed notes, the staff lines being ruled in by hand. The Fust and Schoeffer "Psalterium" of 1457 contained printed staffs, but no notes, it being customary either to write them in by hand or to print them in by means of a hand-punch.

Ulrich Hahn printed a missal at Rome in 1476, in which the music was produced in two printings, the lines in red, and the notes in black ink.

It was not until 1525 that Pierre Haultin, of Paris, contrived a font of metal type by which music could be printed in one impression.

Pierre Attaingnant was a prominent French music printer and publisher in the Renaissance who was one of the earliest to use single-impression printing.

Before 1527 Attaingnant began using a newly invented movable music type, in which a fragment of a musical staff was combined with a note on each piece of type.

He used the new type in a book of chansons, Chansons Nouvelles (1528). Because Attaingnant's single-impression method halved the time and labour formerly needed to print music, it was quickly adopted throughout Europe.

Page from Chansons Nouvelles (1528) clearly showing individual pieces of type