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    Musical Handwriting or How to Put Music on Paper - A Handbook for All Musicians, Professional and Amateur
    Musical Handwriting or How to Put Music on Paper - A Handbook for All Musicians, Professional and Amateur
    Musical Handwriting or How to Put Music on Paper - A Handbook for All Musicians, Professional and Amateur
    Ebook133 pages3 hours

    Musical Handwriting or How to Put Music on Paper - A Handbook for All Musicians, Professional and Amateur

    By Archibald Jacob

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    About this ebook

    Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRead Books Ltd.
    Release dateSep 6, 2016
    ISBN9781473356719
    Musical Handwriting or How to Put Music on Paper - A Handbook for All Musicians, Professional and Amateur

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      Musical Handwriting or How to Put Music on Paper - A Handbook for All Musicians, Professional and Amateur - Archibald Jacob

      Stein.

      Chapter 1. MATERIALS

      THE first requisites for good work of any kind are efficient tools and reasonably good materials. Although, after six years of war, we may have to take more trouble to find them, reasonably good materials can still be obtained, and if sometimes we have to be content with things which fall short of our ideal standards, this is no reason for having no standards at all. In what follows therefore some of the advice formerly given has been modified but recommendations are retained which, even if they are for a while difficult to carry out completely, at any rate show us what to aim at, so that at least we may get as near to our target as possible.

      However, ‘reasonably’ good materials need not be highly priced; the dearest are not always the best, though, in this connexion as in all others, the very cheapest may come more expensive in the long run. A little trouble in the search, and some care in selection will often provide us with a medium-priced article of just as good quality as the expensive one which first falls under our eye.

      No one, for example, can write well when seated on a rickety chair at an unsteady table. Neither object need be a thing of beauty, of any particular value, but both must be solid and firm. The relative height of the chair and table must naturally vary with the build of the individual writer, but it should be such that all the muscles are loose and comfortable. Too low a table soon produces pains in the back, while too high a one results in cramp in the elbows and shoulders. The table should have a hard, smooth surface, and, if possible, be large enough to accommodate a book-rest without interfering with the spread of arms and papers. The student, or young composer, will find it a great advantage to have a special work-table in a particular place where the light is good, and a suitable chair (not so soft as to be conducive to sleep) kept near it. Man is a creature of habit, and although we may not all be such fetishists that we have to dress ourselves, like Haydn, in our best clothes and jewellery before we compose, yet the mere action of sitting down in an accustomed place at an accustomed table and chair will do much to induce in the mind the favourable mood and the impulse to creative work. It is not necessary to be a yogi to realize that the mind functions best when the body and all physical conditions are unobtrusive, and this can best be secured by making the physical conditions completely a matter of habit.

      In daylight the illumination should fall on the table from the left; if it comes from the right or the back, your writing arm, or your body, will throw shadows across the paper (if you are right-handed) and your eye will soon become tired and inaccurate; never, if you can possibly help it, sit facing the light, or allow bright sunlight to shine on the paper on which you are writing. With artificial light the lamp (of sufficient but not excessive brilliance) should stand or hang towards the left in the same way; but here an extra precaution is necessary, for, even with the light falling from the left, the eyes will soon become dazzled and blurred unless the lamp is at the right angle. The author was puzzled by this for some time, but finally discovered the reason. The heads of the notes are, when wet, tiny pools of ink, and therefore minute reflecting mirrors, so that the concentrated beam of the lamp is reflected into the eyes by each little wet blob of ink; and since each takes an appreciable time to dry there may be fifty or more of these minute mirrors at a time heliographing into your eyes, continually renewed as you write. Either the lamp, then, or the table must be slightly shifted until the line you are writing looks dead, matt black without any shine at all, and this angle can then be noted and afterwards maintained. Daylight, being diffused, does not produce this effect to any noticeable extent.

      If your table has not a smooth, level top, a small linoleum mat can be obtained quite cheaply, say about 24 by 30 inches, and makes an excellent writing surface.

      So much for general conditions. The tools and materials of the writer are paper, pens, and ink; and we will deal with them in this order.

      PAPER

      The acute shortage of paper, entailed by the war, is already lessening, and though we may still, for some time, not be able to be too fastidious in our choice, some discrimination is certainly possible, and it is well worth while to take some trouble to find a paper which will fulfil the following conditions.

      A good music-paper must be easy to write upon, hold the ink well, not take too long to dry, allow neat erasures, and be sufficiently tough to stand up to some fairly rough usage. A very shiny surface is especially to be avoided, and a greasy one is nearly as bad; the former attracts too much ink from the nib, while the latter repels it, so that in the one case the writing becomes unsteady and blotchy, and in the other becomes full of ghostly lines where the ink has not taken. Both surfaces are also bad driers and form a dirty patch round an erasure.

      The best surface of all is one with a texture lying between limits represented by a hot-pressed drawing-paper and a Bristol board, though it is hardly necessary to say that we use this only as a description of a species of surface, since, except for very special purposes, nobody could afford to employ drawing-paper for writing music.

      The staves should be printed in fairly black ink, with rather thin lines; thick lines have a dazzling effect and also much reduce the area available for the insertion of the notes in the spaces, a very serious disadvantage in the writing of white notes and chords. Fanciful colourings such as green or bright blue staves are best avoided, as these are trying to the eyes.

      We need as much room as possible for leger lines, so the depth of the whole stave must not be too great to allow plenty of space between staves. Five-sixteenths of an inch is ample on a folio or quarto¹ 12-stave sheet, and three-eighths should be the deepest permissible. On full-score paper the depth of the staves will naturally vary greatly according to the number required by the size of the orchestra; but if possible the distance between the staves should always be at least half as great again as the depth of the stave, otherwise there will be continuous difficulty with leger lines.

      For most purposes the plain 12-stave quarto paper is the most convenient; for songs and solo instruments with piano, the folio has the advantage of giving more room for words or for leger lines (e.g. below the line for the clarinet, or above for violin, &c.); for orchestral scores the ruling, if obtainable, which suits best the size of the orchestra used, will naturally be chosen.

      If varied rulings once more become readily available, manufacturers will no doubt provide, as before, charts of the variations from which paper can be selected suitable for special

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