Printed music

15th century

Music engraving is the art of drawing music notation at high quality for the purpose of mechanical reproduction. The first machine-printed music appeared around 1473, approximately 20 years after Gutenberg introduced the printing press. In 1501, Ottaviano Petrucci published Harmonice Musices Odhecaton A, which contained 96 pieces of printed music. Petrucci's printing method produced clean, readable, elegant music, but it was a long, difficult process that required three separate passes through the printing press. Petrucci later developed a process which required only two passes through the press. But it was still taxing since each pass required very precise alignment for the result to be legible (i.e., so that the note heads would be correctly lined up with the staff lines). This was the first well-distributed printed polyphonic music. Petrucci also printed the first tablature with movable type. Single impression printing, in which the staff lines and notes could be printed in one pass, first appeared in London around 1520. Pierre Attaingnant brought the technique into wide use in 1528, and it remained little changed for 200 years.