I always read Pauline Gravel’s articles with great pleasure. Scientific articles are reassuring because they prove what experience teaches us. Young musicians in the making of the 18th centurye century had no choice but to copy by hand the music that interested them or that they wanted to learn. All these beautiful people used paper and pencil. When he was very young, J.-S. Bach copied hundreds of pages of music from Italy (Frescobaldi), France (D’Anglebert and de Grigny, for example) and elsewhere. He honed his craft while learning music from the masters who had preceded him. As for his contemporary, Christoph Graupner, he explains to us that as a teenager, during his studies in Leipzig, he was hired by his master, Johann Kuhnau (Bach’s predecessor at Saint-Thomas in Leipzig) to copy his music and that this is how he learned to compose the most and best. For my part, I have always noticed that copying texts (musical or poetic) by hand made me learn them very quickly…
Long live pencil and paper!
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