John Howell wrote, in part:
The operative characteristic of 16th and 17th century music from
movable type is that each piece of type has not only the musical
character but the 5 staff lines on it, so as you look across the page
the staff lines are a little bit wavy rather than being absolutely
straight. (Not true of Petrucci's earlier publications, which used a
triple-impression method.) Are you referring to some different
approach or modification of this technology? I've certainly never
seen a Novello publication with those wavy staff lines.
Yes, there was a modification of the technology, in that whereas some
characters, for example clefs, barlines, and accidentals, included one
or more staff lines, other characters, notes, slurs, &c. were assembled
from smaller pieces. A quarter note might have been composed of two
elements, the notehead and the stem. The music lines in items set this
way may usually do not have the wavy lines, you describe, as I
understand the term. However, close examination will show that there are
breaks in the staff lines, and other places. The size of the breaks
depended upon the age and amount of use the type distribution had seen.
If the type was new, these breaks can be nearly invisible; in it was
older, and worn, or contained pieces from a different font (as I suspect
is the case in the example I post the link to) they are more easily
seen. The scan at
<http://users.waymark.net/mjolnir/mus_smp1.png> [NB: Scan of the first
three measures of Hymn 349 form the 19th printing of /The Hymnal/,
dating from about 1925, published by the Augustana Book Concern, Rock
Island, IL. Image size is about 38k.]
is one of the more evident examples in the hymnal I refer to, though the
breaks will be more clear if the image is downloaded and opened in an
image processing program, so that it can be enlarged. As far as
Novello's editions, I have seen organ music and piano music from the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries published by Novello which
appears to have been plate engraved, but all of the choral music
(octavos, and larger works) and for hymnals and song books I've seen
from Novello show, upon close inspection, that they were printed with
movable music type.
ns
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