“Shrine20230918 14911 1laaecj” in “Early printed polyphony”
Early Printed Polyphony
As you probably already know, European moveable type printing was invented in Germany around 1440 (if this is news to you, read about it here). The invention of moveable type had huge ramifications for the spread of literacy and written information. It wasn’t that long before an enterprising publisher figured out how to print music using similar techniques, with similar consequences on the spread of musical sources.
Printing itself has a longer history: I’m sure you yourself made potato prints or lino prints at various times over the course of your education. All sorts of materials can be made to transfer ink onto surfaces. The intricate nature of musical notation made older forms of musical printing very difficult—even more difficult than printing words. This should be obvious if you think about words, which in most European languages utilize a limited number of letters, organized into neat rows and always appearing at the same level along the line of text. With music, however, the limited number of note shapes are complicated by the need to show their pitched relationship to each other on a grid of staff lines. As you can imagine, if you had to engrave music into a block of wood in order to ink and print it, the shape of each note against the lines would be very difficult to form. There are a few extant examples of woodblock music printing from before the invention of moveable type for music; here is one: this dates from 1487 (the late fifteenth century).
In 1501, Ottaviano Petrucci (the name will be familiar to anyone who has used the notation software Finale, which uses the “Petrucci” font) printed an entire volume of music using moveable type: here is a link to the entire text of the Odhecaton A. As you page through it (look at the first 20 pages of so), consider the fact that two pages would have been open in a single spread allowing instrumentalists (or singers, if they knew the words), to recreate the entire piece sharing the one source. Petrucci used a time consuming but very elegant and accurate technique that required pages to be printed three times: first, for the staff; second for the words; and third for the notes. Each impression (as the printing is called) had to line up meticulously with the others, so that the notes would appear on the correct lines. Look at the neatness of the print, and particularly at the way the staff lines are continuous.
Petrucci’s method spread, but his imitators wanted to do things more quickly and cheaply. The third example here is a page from a print by Pierre Attaignant. If you look closely at the staff lines, you can see that they are disjointed, and that the print has been made in a single-impression with moveable type that includes both the lines and the notes.
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