At 9:56 PM -0500 3/5/10, Kim Patrick Clow wrote:
Good day:
I'm quite behind the times: I just discovered that H.C. Robbins-Landon
passed away last November. I was a big fan of his Haydn 5 vol
biography that was huge. I remember there were a lot of musical
examples provided in those books. My question is: back in the 1970s
when the Haydn biography was printed, were publishers using plates for
such music score examples? I remember my college weekly newspaper was
using a very clunky computer- it would churn out small ribbons of tape
with the graphics on it, which were in turn glued to a sticky piece of
paper. So I would imagine that a large book company during this period
was using much more sophisticated computers for text, but again-- what
were they doing for music; and how would they marry computer generated
mock-ups of text with plate engraving?
This is just a guess (I was in grad school and starting my college
teaching in the '70s), but I seriously doubt that either computer
typesetting or computer music engraving was being used at that time.
I may be wrong, and I believe that Score might have been in use, but
you have to remember that there were no personal computers at that
time, all computer use was time-sharing on large machines (which were
horribly limited by today's standards), and publishers had been
sending engraving to Asia for hand punch engraving for years. (In my
own work I still used a typewriter, and for music good old purple
Ditto or hand copy.) When I came here in '79 and for a number of
years thereafter, students were carrying their computer "programs"
around in boxes of IBM cards. Linotype machines and hand-set type
for small runs were the order of the day in the '70s, and
proofreading was sometimes less than perfect. (For one of our early
music programs the typesetter substituted a "u" for the "a" in
"sackbutt"!!!!)
I didn't own or use a personal computer until about '83 (a Commodore
64), about the time the Apple II came out, and music setting programs
were pretty primitive back then. On the other hand, the first super
computers were designed by Bell for the Manhattan Project back in the
'40s, according to the folks in New Mexico where they were used. But
they (like the RCA Mark II Synthesizer used by Milton Babbitt in the
'50s) used vacuum tubes and required climate controlled clean-room
environments--and they took up entire rooms--or entire floors!
John
--
John R. Howell, Assoc. Prof. of Music
Virginia Tech Department of Music
College of Liberal Arts & Human Sciences
Blacksburg, Virginia, U.S.A. 24061-0240
Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034
(mailto:john.how...@vt.edu)
http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html
"We never play anything the same way once." Shelly Manne's definition
of jazz musicians.
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