On Tuesday 21 January 2003 03:24 pm, Jean-Pierre COULON wrote: > Rencently, we had a thread about books about music engraving > standards. After this, I decided to buy Chlapik's book, which begins > with a very interesting chapter about traditional hand-engraving of > music:
There are **no** real authorities on the subject, but many to be learned from. There is no substitute for looking at a lot of old and new music. Some things have improved, and others have definitely gone downhill. > > The engraver would scratch the soft metal plate whith a five-pronged > stylus to provide the staves, and ... ping, ping, ping ! ... he would > hammer the musical symbols into the plate. The tools hit with the hammer were called burens. For a dot of course you would just stab the plate. They liked dots a lot. > He would write from right > to left. :-) > (There is a shorter, similar article on: > http://www.henle.de/englisch/info/notenstich.htm Many people appreciate the artwork of the old engravers. They were not good artists. The impressive thing in that craft is to maintain concentration so as not to make mistakes. > > Afterwards, the plate would be moistered with green ink, which would > result into a "green copy", with white symbols on a green background, > with the proper orientation. This copy was intended for proof > reading. (green is claimed to be the most ergonomical colour for this > purpose) I imagine chemistry had more to do with it. It is essential that the ink not adhere to the lands. Or were the lands the cavities? CRS. > > Nowadays, the following set of copies is made with photographic > techniques. But in the past, the same plate was used to print the > *entire* set of copies. A Riso printer photocopies onto a roller and prints thousands of offset copies real quick. Offset printing is printing from something that was printed by something else. Point is that there is only one original. > > Does anybody know how you could provide copies with black symbols > on a white background ? What caused the ink to remain in the > engraved cavities ? If this plate was used as a mould, No. The whole idea was to print with the ink in the cavities, IOW to print itaglio. I'm sure some waxy substance was applied to the surface to help prevent the ink from sticking to the flat. The ink was applied with a roller, I have always assumed. Copperplate engraving could have been invented before movable metal type was developed in Italy, but it wasn't, so musical directions are still in Italian. It is not possible to publish operas, etc., with woodcut or wooden type, so the Italians had a monopoly on music printing for about 70 years IIRC. >to provide > another plate with symbols *higher* than the background, this > plate would have had the correct orientation, but the copies > wouldn't ? I have a copy of the Carcassi book which is partly engraved plate and partly typeset. The quickest way of telling the difference is to look at the left ends of the staff lines. Typeset had to be closed, but engraved was usually open. Pages with lots of text and short musical examples would be typeset. > I welcome technical details. Me too. The topic is not entirely irrelevant to computer typesetting. DaveA -- "Melody is the gift of God." --Quincy Jones "No, it isn't." dra@ or http://www.openguitar.com _______________________________________________ TeX-music mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://sunsite.dk/mailman/listinfo/tex-music
