At 7:09 PM +0000 11/1/12, Lawrence Yates wrote: >Here in the UK, most photocopiers work on A4 or A3. We always believed >that publishers used the unusual (to us) sizes so that the music couldn't >be easily copied.
Interesting theory. I've always assumed that this was a size produced by folding and refolding large sheets of paper in a standard European size that may have gone back to Shakespeare or even before, which gave us folio, quarto, and octavo sizes (the latter still very popular for choral music and very unusual for any other use at all!). But copying technology, while it is widespread and unavoidable today, is a rather recent technology. Back when I was in high school (early '50s) the only choices for copying were purple ditto and that other common office machine, the name of which escapes me at the moment, both of which required typing up masters on special paper because they were not PHOTO-copiers and the special paper had the "ink" that was transferred to the copies. (And photostats, of course, which were pictures of pages on film.) Around 1950 3M came out with a copier that made HORRIBLE copies, would only take single sheets and not pages in books, used a special very thin, floppy paper that was awful for music and faded over time, and used a liquid developer. We have indeed come a long way since THOSE days! And of course music publishers have been around since 1501, using whatever paper sizes were common at the time. Most of the modern copiers here in the U.S. can be set for A4 or A3 paper, but we simply can't readily buy paper in that size (just as you probably can't easily buy paper in U.S. sizes). Which becomes a problem when one of our foreign students submits an assignment formatted for A4 and our copier sits there and waits for us to feed it some A4!!! John -- John R. Howell, Assoc. Prof. of Music Virginia Tech Department of Music School of Performing Arts & Cinema College of Liberal Arts & Human Sciences 290 College Ave., Blacksburg, Virginia 24061-0240 Vox (540) 231-8411 Fax (540) 231-5034 (mailto:john.how...@vt.edu) http://www.music.vt.edu/faculty/howell/howell.html "Machen Sie es, wie Sie wollen, machen Sie es nur schön." (Do it as you like, just make it beautiful!) --Johannes Brahms _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list Finale@shsu.edu http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
