# Composer



## ldiat (Jan 27, 2016)

ok a strange question and i do not know the answer. take Mozart. when he composed music, did he have to write the music for all the instruments? or any composer in that era. did they have to copy all the music for each player? thanks


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## KenOC (Mar 7, 2011)

Composers' autograph scores were usually written on multi-stave pages, including all the instruments. Copyists would use the autographs to create the sheet music for the various instruments of the orchestra, a process prone to mistakes (and given the engraving techniques of the time, very slow and expensive).

The back-and-forth between composer and publisher to check for errors and so forth was time-consuming, especially given the vagaries of the mail at the time. Two or three years might elapse between the time a symphony was written and the time it became available for sale from a publisher.


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## mbhaub (Dec 2, 2016)

When I was in college, our orchestration professor demanded that all parts were written in INK on onion skin music paper. What a laborious, mind-numbing task. Then you look at something like the Dvorak New World - all the parts were copied by hand - and it's far, far longer than anything I ever did in Orchestration. But then you realize that back in Dvorak's day there were no photocopiers. So if you needed eight stands of first violins, someone had to copy that part eight times. Same with all the strings. The parts for the first performance can be seen on the New York Philharmonic's website. Mahler used to pay through the nose for copyists, as did a lot of other composers who didn't have the time to write their own parts. It's an intensely time consuming task and so prone to errors. There are a lot of interesting stories of rehearsals being sabotaged by parts that are full of mistakes.

Otto Klemperer wrote about when he was at the premier of the Mahler 7th that he and other acolytes would spend endless hours after rehearsals re-copying and correcting parts.

When it became viable to purchase computer software that did all this automatically with no possibility of copying errors, I was right there buying Finale 1.0. But oddly, I still prefer the creative act - writing a short score or full score - on paper. Even though it slows me down, there's something about the music going from your brain through the arm and fingers to the pencil tip that's magical.


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## ldiat (Jan 27, 2016)

wow! thanks! great stuff!


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## starthrower (Dec 11, 2010)

> Even though it slows me down, there's something about the music going from your brain through the arm and fingers to the pencil tip that's magical.


Wonderful to look at too! I'm glad they didn't have computers 200 years ago.


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