Printing Music

Printing music onto paper presented many challenges for early modern European printers. Musical notations were far more complicated than text. To produce beautiful music, the notations had to be placed accurately on the staff lines, and aligned perfectly with the words that they were intended to embellish. Before the use of movable type in music printing, wood blocks proved to be the most effective mechanism.

This piece on the life of St. Francis probably dates from the early sixteenth century, and is based on the thirteenth-century music written by Julian of Speyer. The printer carved an inverse image of the notations onto wood and then pressed it onto paper. In order to achieve the colour effects seen here, the printer must have made individual wood blocks for each colour, one in red and the other in black. Then, he would have printed each wood block onto the same piece of paper.

Note: Because of the size of this leaf, this image is an excerpt of its upper-left corner.

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