Music manuscript

There exists a wide variety of types from sketches and fragments, to compositional scores and presentation copies of musical works.

The earliest written sources of Western European music can be found in medieval manuscripts of the late 9th century that contain liturgical texts.

[2] In the past, each composer was required to draw their own staff lines (staves) onto blank paper.

For larger scale works, a copyist was often employed to hand-copy individual parts (for each musician) from a composer's musical score.

With the advent of the personal computer in the late 1980s and beyond, music typesetting could now be accomplished by a graphics computer software made for this purpose, such as Dorico, Finale, Musescore, or Sibelius, which has reduced the necessity of music manuscripts.