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Musical Offerings
⦁
2016
⦁
Volume 7
⦁
Number 2
73
that are quite long and thin in comparison. The noteheads of Typography
II are less peaked and more rounded, and their size is small enough to fit
in the staff without overlapping the staff lines.
25
Figure 3: Typography II
26
Whether or not Petrucci did his own punchcutting is uncertain, but
Attaingnant almost certainly, at least for a time (perhaps early in his
career), engraved his own type. A peculiar dispute led to a court case
between Pierre Simon Fournier le Jeune and a family known as the
Ballards, who had held a two-hundred-year-old monopoly on music
printing despite their remarkably outdated technology. The resulting
court documents name “atteignant” as the inventor of the “large chant
note carrying its staff,” meaning the individual pieces of type carrying
both a note and its staff fragment.
27
Heartz goes into great detail of this
court case in his
Historical Study
, but the main conclusion applicable to
this discussion is that Attaingnant did indeed engrave his own type for a
time.
28
25
Daniel Heartz, “Typography and Format in Early Music Printing: With
Particular Reference to Attaingnant’s First Publications,”
Notes
23, no. 4
(1967): 703.
26
Georg Kinsky, ed.,
A History of Music in Pictures
. (New York: Dover,
1951), 95.
27
Heartz,
Royal Printer of Music
, 56.
28
Ibid., 49–56.