Calligraphy

What it means

In a musical context, calligraphy (German Kalligraphie) means artfully and carefully executed musical notation. What is meant is not beauty for its own sake alone: a musical manuscript must be legible under performance conditions, often from some distance, often in half-darkness, often by several people at once. Shape and usability are therefore closely connected.

In the notation

Clean execution includes even spacing of the lines, noteheads of uniform slant and size, stems of constant length, and beams whose angle follows the direction of the melodic line. Accidentals, slurs, and dynamic markings have fixed places; where they slip, ambiguities arise. Splendid manuscripts of the Renaissance and Baroque go beyond this and connect musical notation with illumination, decorated initials, and coloured rubrics. Such volumes were representative objects as much as working scores.

Musical use

Before the spread of music printing, the manuscript was the only way of transmission, and the quality of execution decided how reliably a work was passed on. Even afterwards, copying by hand long remained usual, for instance for parts from a score. Professional music copyists worked into well into the twentieth century, and even today in music engraving it holds that good design speeds up reading: a cleanly set page is grasped faster and misread more rarely than a cramped one.

Calligraphy is to be distinguished from the autograph, which designates the handwriting of the composer without it having to be artful — many working manuscripts are hard to read.

Until the spread of music printing, music was copied by hand in monasteries and workshops.

Performance practice

If you write out parts or exercises for yourself, keep to the basic rules of placement: accidentals to the left of the head, dot to its right, slurs above the noteheads when stems point downward. Leave enough room between the bars and do not write more bars per line than can be read comfortably. And enter your own annotations in pencil and in a consistent manner — an overloaded page of music costs more time in an emergency than it saves.