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Sheet music, sometimes called “score,” is the hand-written or printed form of musical notation, or the system that represents aurally perceived music via the use of written symbols. The history of musical notation, and therefore of sheet music, is a long one. There are those who hold that the earliest sheet music known is a fragment of a cuneiform tablet from Nippur, an ancient Babylonian city, and dates from approximately 2000 BCE. While this music was written on a clay tablet rather than paper, it still constitutes sheet music because the term “sheet” merely differentiates music on paper from audio presentation. So although the tablet’s notations are fragmentary and somewhat simple, it is probably safe to say that they represent the earliest recorded melodies in the world.

Anyone familiar with ancient Greek civilization will not be surprised to learn that the sheet music of those people was relatively complex. Ancient Greek musical notation was capable of representing pitch, note duration and, to a limited extent, harmony. It consisted of symbols placed above text syllables and was in use from at least the 6th century BCE until approximately the 4th century CE, a date that coincides with the fall of the Roman Empire.

Sheet music, like Europe as a whole, suffered a major blow when Rome fell. The art of writing music all but vanished during the times that followed, which are commonly referred to as the Dark Ages. However, by the middle of the 9th century, musical notation began to revive thanks to the Roman Catholic Church. The Gregorian chant was a ubiquitous form of worship in those days, and the monks performing it developed specific symbols, neumes, in order to record it on paper.  Read more...

The history of modern sheet music, at least in the West, can be appropriately begun with the advent of the printing press in the middle of the 15th century. Until this time, music had been handwritten and generally preserved in large, bound volumes of manuscripts. The shift from handwritten to machine-printed did not occur overnight, and much music continued to exist solely in manuscripts until well into the 18th century. However, no one will argue that just as the printing press changed the history of the written word, so it also altered the course of sheet music.

The first printed book to include music was the Mainz psalter, a collection of psalms, and it was printed in 1457 by Johann Fust and Peter Shoffer. However, these gentlemen had not yet managed to figure out how to print music using movable type, the result being that the musical notation was added in by hand. It was not until 1473 that the first machine-printed book was produced, and it was still a long and laborious process and the result was less than perfect. Improvements continued to be made, however, and in 1501 the Harmonice Musices Odhecaton A, which contained 96 pieces of clean, readable music, was printed. It required three passes through the printing press, but it was still a step forward. This process was later reduced to two passes and finally, in 1520, to a single pass.  Read more...