Noth­ing could seem more ordi­nary to any­one who has grown up with a musi­cian in the house, or tak­en music class­es them­selves, than sheaves of sheet music: quar­ter, half, and whole notes trip­ping through order­ly staffs in chords, arpeg­gios, and melodies. But the process of mak­ing those sheets of music is prob­a­bly far less famil­iar to most of us. Music print­ing his­to­ry, as the site Music Print­ing His­to­ry shows, par­al­lels book print­ing, but uses the tech­nolo­gies dif­fer­ent­ly, from wood­block to lith­o­g­ra­phy to pho­to­graph­ic repro­duc­tion to per­haps a rarely seen method—the music type­writer.

These inge­nious machines do exact­ly what it sounds like they do, in type­writer-like forms we’ll rec­og­nize and oth­er forms we will not. The first patent for such a device, filed in 1885 by Charles Spiro, shows an object resem­bling a sewing machine.

The next inven­tion, first patent­ed by F. Dogilbert in 1906, resem­bles a mechan­i­cal engrav­ing machine—and indeed, that’s more or less what it was. By con­trast, the 1946 Musicwriter, invent­ed by Cecil S. Effin­ger, looks just like an ear­ly IBM type­writer with a QWERTY key­board. The next ver­sion of the machine was, in fact, a word proces­sor made by IBM.

One inven­tion Music Print­ing His­to­ry does not men­tion was made by a woman, Miss Lil­lian Pavey, in 1961. In the British Pathé news­reel film above, you can see her type­writer in action as she tran­scribes music from a record in real time. In-between the ear­li­est music type­writ­ers, which were not mass-mar­ket­ed to con­sumers, and IBM’s slick, 1988 Musicwriter II, which was, there is the odd Keaton Music Type­writer, first patent­ed with 14 keys in 1936, then again in 1953 in a 33-key ver­sion.

See the Keaton’s clunky oper­a­tion at the top of the post. It looks a lit­tle like a seis­mo­graph or lie detec­tor machine with a semi­cir­cu­lar dou­ble ring of keys (in the 33-key design) in the cen­ter of a met­al car­riage. (See the orig­i­nal patent below.) Con­trary to the Pathé newsman’s claim that no one had suc­ceed­ed in mak­ing a work­ing music type­writer, the Keaton and oth­er mod­els to fol­low in the 40s and 50s sold, though not in large quan­ti­ties, and “made it eas­i­er for pub­lish­ers, edu­ca­tors, and oth­er musi­cians to pro­duce music copies in quan­ti­ty.” Typed sheet music could eas­i­ly be mass-repro­duced by pho­tog­ra­phy.

Nonethe­less, Music Print­ing His­to­ry notes, “com­posers… pre­ferred to write the music out by hand.” The type­writer was main­ly offered as a tool for mechan­i­cal repro­duc­tion, not spon­ta­neous com­po­si­tion. Com­put­ers have changed things such that com­posers seem to have the same kinds of debates about hand­writ­ing vers­es dig­i­tal as writ­ers do. But where the type­writer is still a pow­er­ful sym­bol of lit­er­ary art—for some an instru­ment as dis­tinc­tive and wor­thy of study as the gui­tars of rock ‘n’ roll greats—the music type­writer is an odd­i­ty, a mechan­i­cal curios­i­ty no one asso­ciates with cre­ation.

Yet, as “the most vin­tage and won­der­ful­ly imprac­ti­cal thing ever,” as Clas­sic Fm dubs the device, unwieldy machines like the Keaton remain high on the list of cool, quirky inven­tions its most like­ly cus­tomers did­n’t real­ly seem to need.

via Boing Boing

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Behold Friedrich Nietzsche’s Curi­ous Type­writer, the “Malling-Hansen Writ­ing Ball”

The Endur­ing Ana­log Under­world of Gramer­cy Type­writer

Con­serve the Sound, an Online Muse­um Pre­serves the Sounds of Past Technologies–from Type­writ­ers, Elec­tric Shavers and Cas­sette Recorders, to Cam­eras & Clas­sic Nin­ten­do

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Image by Mark Ordonez, via Flickr Com­mons

We all have respect, even awe, for the name Stradi­var­ius, even those of us who have nev­er held a vio­lin, let alone played one. The vio­lins — as well as vio­las, cel­los, and oth­er string instru­ments, includ­ing gui­tars — made by mem­bers of the Stradi­vari fam­i­ly 300 years ago have become sym­bols of pure son­ic qual­i­ty, still not quite replic­a­ble with even 21st-cen­tu­ry tech­nol­o­gy, with rar­i­ty and prices to match. But to tru­ly under­stand the pre­cious­ness of the Stradi­var­ius, look not to the auc­tion house but to the north­ern Ital­ian city of Cre­mona, home of the Museo del Vio­li­no and its col­lec­tion of some of the best-pre­served exam­ples of the 650 sur­viv­ing Stradi­var­ius instru­ments in the world.

“Cre­mona is home to the work­shops of some of the world’s finest instru­ment mak­ers, includ­ing Anto­nio Stradi­vari, who in the 17th and 18th cen­turies pro­duced some of the finest vio­lins and cel­los ever made,” writes The New York Times’ Max Par­adiso.

“The city is get­ting behind an ambi­tious project to dig­i­tal­ly record the sounds of the Stradi­var­ius instru­ments for pos­ter­i­ty, as well as oth­ers by Amati and Guarneri del Gesù, two oth­er famous Cre­mona crafts­men. And that means being qui­et.” It’s all to help the ambi­tious record­ing project now cre­at­ing the Stradi­var­ius Sound Bank, “a data­base stor­ing all the pos­si­ble tones that four instru­ments select­ed from the Museo del Violino’s col­lec­tion can pro­duce.”

This requires great efforts on the part of the engi­neers and the per­form­ers, the lat­ter of whom have to play hun­dreds of scales and arpeg­gios (exam­ples of which you can hear embed­ded in The New York Times arti­cle) on these stag­ger­ing­ly valu­able instru­ments. But the peo­ple of Cre­mona have to coop­er­ate, too: in the area around the Museo del Vio­li­no’s audi­to­ri­um where the Stradi­var­ius Sound Bank is record­ing, “the sound of a car engine, or a woman walk­ing in high heels, pro­duces vibra­tions that run under­ground and rever­ber­ate in the micro­phones, mak­ing the record­ing worth­less.” And so Cre­mon­a’s may­or, also the pres­i­dent of the Stradi­var­ius Foun­da­tion, “allowed the streets around the muse­um to be closed for five weeks, and appealed to peo­ple in the city to keep it down.”

Few of us alive today have heard the sound of a Stradi­var­ius in per­son, but that num­ber will shrink fur­ther still in future gen­er­a­tions. It’s to do with the very nature of these cen­turies-old instru­ments which, no mat­ter what kind of efforts go toward mak­ing them playable, still seem to have a finite lifes­pan. “We pre­serve and restore them,” Par­adiso quotes Museo del Vio­li­no cura­tor Faus­to Cac­cia­tori as say­ing, “but after they reach a cer­tain age, they become too frag­ile to be played and they ‘go to sleep,’ so to speak.” The day will pre­sum­ably come when the last Stradi­var­ius goes to sleep, but by that time the sounds they made will still be wide awake in their dig­i­tized sec­ond life. And we can be cer­tain, at least, that future gen­er­a­tions will think of a musi­cal use for them that we can no more imag­ine now than Anto­nio Stradi­vari could have in his day.

via The New York Times

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Why Stradi­var­ius Vio­lins Are Worth Mil­lions

What Makes the Stradi­var­ius Spe­cial? It Was Designed to Sound Like a Female Sopra­no Voice, With Notes Sound­ing Like Vow­els, Says Researcher

Why Vio­lins Have F‑Holes: The Sci­ence & His­to­ry of a Remark­able Renais­sance Design

Musi­cian Plays the Last Stradi­var­ius Gui­tar in the World, the “Sabionari” Made in 1679

Watch Price­less 17-Cen­tu­ry Stradi­var­ius and Amati Vio­lins Get Tak­en for a Test Dri­ve by Pro­fes­sion­al Vio­lin­ists

Musi­cian Plays the Last Stradi­var­ius Gui­tar in the World, the “Sabionari” Made in 1679

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

When we go to a con­cert of orches­tral music today, we hear most every piece played on the same range of instru­ments — instru­ments we know and love, to be sure, but instru­ments designed and oper­at­ed with­in quite strict para­me­ters. The pleas­ing qual­i­ty of the sounds they pro­duce may make us believe that we’re hear­ing every­thing just as the com­pos­er orig­i­nal­ly intend­ed, but we usu­al­ly aren’t. To hear what the likes of Mozart, Beethoven, Han­del, and Haydn would have had in their head as they com­posed back in their day, you’d have to have an orches­tra go so far as to play it not with mod­ern instru­ments, but the same ones orches­tras used back in those com­posers’ life­times.

Enter Lon­don’s Orches­tra of the Age of the Enlight­en­ment, which takes its name from the era of the late 18th cen­tu­ry from which it draws most of its reper­toire — and from which it draws most of its instru­ments, a vital part of its mis­sion to achieve peri­od-accu­rate sound. You can read more about the OAE’s instru­ments on its web site, or bet­ter yet, head over to its Youtube chan­nel to hear those instru­ments demon­strat­ed and their his­tor­i­cal back­grounds explained. Here we have four of the OAE’s videos: on the clar­inet they use for Mozart’s Clar­inet Con­cer­to, on the con­tra­bas­soon they use for Beethoven’s Fifth Sym­pho­ny and Hayd­n’s Cre­ation, the organ they use for Han­del’s Organ Con­cer­to, and an oboe like the one Haydn would have known.

“We love the music we play,” says OAE dou­ble bassist Cecelia Brugge­mey­er, “and we love ask­ing ques­tions about the music we play.” So when you use an instru­ment like the 300-year-old bass she shows off in anoth­er video, “you sud­den­ly find it does­n’t nec­es­sar­i­ly do the things a mod­ern instru­ment will do, and that sets up a whole train of ques­tions.” These include, “What would Bach have heard? How might the play­ers in his day have played? What does that mean for us, play­ing today? What does that mean for live music now, with this his­toric infor­ma­tion? We’re not try­ing to re-cre­ate the past. We’re try­ing to make some­thing that’s excit­ing now but using what was from the past” — not a bad metaphor, come to think of it, for the entire enter­prise of clas­si­cal-music per­for­mance in the 21st cen­tu­ry.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Ancient Greek Music Sound­ed Like: Hear a Recon­struc­tion That is ‘100% Accu­rate’

Watch a Musi­cian Impro­vise on a 500-Year-Old Music Instru­ment, The Car­il­lon

Vis­it an Online Col­lec­tion of 61,761 Musi­cal Instru­ments from Across the World

Musi­cian Plays the Last Stradi­var­ius Gui­tar in the World, the “Sabionari” Made in 1679

Hear a 9,000 Year Old Flute—the World’s Old­est Playable Instrument—Get Played Again

The Musi­cal Instru­ments in Hierony­mus Bosch’s The Gar­den of Earth­ly Delights Get Brought to Life, and It Turns Out That They Sound “Painful” and “Hor­ri­ble”

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les and the video series The City in Cin­e­ma. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.