Historical Gallery

These selections have been drawn from the more extensive archive of historic manuscripts collected as part of the ongoing The Mind To Music Project. They are pages of handwritten scores by some of the greatest composers in western classical music and serve to illustrate, not only the range, but also the expressed beauty of handmade sheets of music throughout history.

Until moveable music type was invented in 1501, a composer would work with a copyist to ‘clean up’ an often massive and unruly score. Once legible, the score was printed and bound. Many original handwritten manuscripts owned by churches, royalty, and public and private libraries were discarded in favor of the new neatly bound printed editions resulting in the loss of much original material.

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Contemporary Gallery

Western classical music has experienced a relatively small number of technological innovations over the course of its existence, the most recent being computer-driven notation. Each invention since the music printer (16th century) made life considerably easier for the artist and none more so than the graphite pencil and gum eraser (end of the 18th century). Amazingly, these humble tools completely revolutionized the way composers and performers could interact with printed texts. As paper became cheaper, musical artists could purchase scores, make notations, and change their interpretations at will. Today, many musicians, though not all, continue this centuries’ old practice and each annotated sheet is as personal as a signature. Digitization, with all its many benefits, will certainly produce more visually uniform results.

The Mind To Music Project presents a variety of hand annotations across musical disciplines. Though it makes no claim to scholarship, it does offer a new way of seeing these interactions between composers and performers.

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