What is Music Engraving? A Primer

Music preparation can be a fantastic “side hustle,” particularly for those with experience in composition or arranging. I made the shift from part-time to full-time in early 2024 - I love the work, the flexibility of running my own business allows me to move wherever I want, and I can still take on last-minute performing gigs. It’s also the first time in my life that my answer to the common conversational ice-breaker “what do you do for a living?” is now a paragraph long.

I stumbled over the question for a while, but I’ve now arrived at a fairly concise answer. The elevator pitch:

“I’m a music preparation specialist. I work with composers and ensembles to make sure their sheet music is up to the highest professional standards. When a composer finishes writing a piece, they send it to me, and I take care of all the publishing steps right up until it arrives on the performer’s stand. This includes proofreading, editing, layout, formatting, pagination, and sometimes printing and shipping the parts directly to the ensemble that’s performing it.”

I tend to avoid opening with the term “music engraving” or “music copying” because a lot of people, including highly experienced musicians, aren’t familiar with it. With this article, I'm here to help clear things up.

OTTAWA, ONTARIO: My home office, where the music preparation magic happens.

Music copying, music engraving: What’s the difference?

In our digital age, the terms “music copying” and “music engraving” are functionally interchangeable. There's truly no meaningful distinction anymore, but they hint at two separate lineages of music publishing techniques.

Music engraving

The term “music engraving” hearkens back to the old practice of literally engraving notes and staff lines onto copper plates. There is evidence of music printing in Europe dating back to 1473, using Johann Gutenberg’s revolutionary moveable type printing press. But increasingly complex musical ideas required new innovations in music notation. A musical moveable type kit required far more pieces than a book publishing kit, since there are so many more permutations for how music can be stacked horizontally and vertically. Slurs were an especially difficult thing to achieve with moveable type since it didn’t allow for clean arcs that could cross any amount of the page. It continued to be used well into the 20th century, but it was only suitable for “low-brow” applications: simple hymnals or commercially available folk tunes and carols.

Music pressed from specially engraved metal plates began to appear in the late 16th century and quickly became standard practice for music publishers. Initially, this was done by laboriously cutting every individual detail into a copper plate, from the staff lines to the notes themselves, using a variety of specialized scoring tools. This was a practice that required a great deal of skill and patience and had a very high technical skill ceiling.

A trade card (essentially an early business card!) made by the London-based copper plate engraving artisans Castildine & Dunn. These were produced in 1796 to inform potential customers of their address and showcase the high quality of their craft. SOURCE: The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The introduction of punches in the 18th century made common elements like notes, stems, clefs, dynamics and articulations more efficient to produce and more uniform in design, making the craft more accessible. Copper plates were replaced with pewter (an alloy of tin, antimony, and lead) since it was less expensive, more durable, and could produce a sharper print. An engraver would lightly “mark” the plate to plan out the overall layout, then use a striking hammer to impress each punch into the pewter, creating a backward impression of the page. The plate could then be inked and pressed onto paper to create as many copies as needed. (You can learn more by reading Ted Ross’ 1970 book The Art of Music Engraving and Processing, a captivating time capsule of the craft from before the rise of desktop computers).

This method became especially prominent in the Romantic era for mass-producing the music of popular composers of their time such as Schubert, Beethoven and Brahms. Anyone who performs classical music has certainly performed from parts that were reprinted from originals that were engraved on pewter plates. Much of this work was of such high quality that many music publishers today like Kalmus and Luck’s Music Library still reprint the majority of their products from existing plates crafted in the 19th century.

Music copyists

The idea of music “copying,” on the other hand, is at least as old as the concept of medieval scribes. Prior to Gutenberg’s moveable type printing press, a copy of a musical work could only be made by a human being (usually a monk) painstakingly transcribing it by hand, one copy at a time. Such a labour-intensive production process meant the price of a work like Guillaume de Machaut’s Messe de Nostre Dame was astronomical, outside the reach of all but the Catholic church.

An excerpt from de Machaut’s Messe de Nostre Dame (c. 1365). The book is filled with ornate flourishes such as the “K” at the top left of the page, all hand-copied by scribes. SOURCE: Wikimedia Commons

The idea of hand-copying music did not die out with the rise of music engraving; it was just relegated to more specific use cases. Until the proliferation of scorewriting software, premières were performed on handwritten parts, not pristinely engraved parts. Composers like Haydn and Mozart were unlikely to have copied out individual parts for their own works based on the score; at least one copyist would have been available to do this for him. Lithography, a chemical process for reproducing handwriting, was invented in 1796 and shortly thereafter became a common solution to distribute multiple copies of a piece handwritten by the composer or their copyist.

Music copyists were crucial to the industry all the way up to the end of the 20th century. They were dominant in many genres, particularly big band charts, jazz lead sheets, broadway musicals, and film scoring. A good copyist had a steady hand, an intuitive feel for the visual balance of a nicely laid out part, and an encyclopaedic knowledge of the notational conventions that crystallized over the centuries. Music copying became an art form of its own, with prominent Hollywood copyist Clinton Roemer codifying the craft in 1975 with his book The Art of Music Copying.

Thankfully, you no longer need a foundry in your backyard nor a knack for clean handwriting. These old techniques are extremely rare, only practiced by niche hobbyists who want to explore the traditional craft. With the widespread popularization of music notation software in the 90s, the old methods became obsolete, but the terms “engraving” and “copyist” stuck. Some people take issue with the term “copyist” because it implicitly diminishes the expertise required, but others still wear it as a badge of honour.

The Role of the Modern Music Engraver

It's worth outlining the difference between a music engraver/copyist and a music publisher. A publisher is exactly what it sounds like; an organisation that handles production, distribution and promotion of existing works. Publishers may or may not have engravers on staff. Many major publishers like Breitkopf & Härtel, Schirmer, and Casa Ricordi outsource the work to independent contractors (like me!).

For some projects, like our in-house publications, the engraver and publisher of a project are one in the same. But in most cases, the engraver interfaces with the composer, the publisher, or both. On a typical project, I receive a notation software file directly from the composer (or less frequently, from the publisher), and I send completed deliverables either:

• back to the composer, so they can self-publish or pass along the files personally;
• directly to the librarian for the ensemble that is performing it;
• to the publisher;

or some combination of these three depending on contract stipulations.

My reaction when I receive the first draft from a composer.

At its core, the role of a music engraver is primarily that of graphic design for sheet music. It’s not really a “creative” endeavour, and our input is far less invasive than an editor at a book publishing company. It's essentially a logistical role: a music engraver is not there to suggest improvements or changes to the substance of the music, but to ensure rehearsal can proceed smoothly by creating clear and legible notation. We're still on the lookout for potential mistakes, so a solid working knowledge of music theory is a major asset - but I just flag them for later review by the composer rather than fixing them outright. (imagine if Charles Ives’ copyist went rogue and presumed to “fix” the deliberate “mistakes” in his music! Always best to approach with caution).

An example I cooked up

You may be surprised at the amount of changes that an engraver can make without contravening any of the composer's musical decisions. I've created the following example for illustration purposes:

I won't leave you hanging. Here is the solution: