Founded in 1901 in Vienna, Universal Edition (UE) rapidly became a music publisher whose catalog was built primarily on the works of contemporary composers. Under the directorship of Emile Hertzga, the firm signed publishing contracts with such now-famous composers as Béla Bartók, Frederick Delius, Gustav Mahler, Arnold Schönberg, Anton Webern and Leoš Janáček. This philosophy continued under the leadership of Alfred Schlee, who became director of the firm in 1938 during the German Anschluss. From the 1950s through the 1970s, Schlee avidly pursued and promoted music of the leading composers of the European avant-garde, including Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Luciano Berio, György Ligeti, Harrison Birtwistle and Mauricio Kagel.
It is this period that is of particular interest in the firm’s history. What is remarkable is that hundreds, if not thousands of scores of these post-World War II composers were engraved and published, many scores, in fact, of exceptional notational complexity and originality. No work seems to have been refused because of its complexity. Scores such as Stockhausen’s Gruppen, Boulez’s Pli selon pli, Berio’s Coro and Sinfonia attest to UE’s willingness to engrave and publish that which might have met with instant rejection elsewhere. Profits from the sales of these scores most likely did not outweigh the production costs at the time, but presumably Schlee regarded these publications as financial investments for a future time.
Who were the persons who were responsible for engraving these formidable scores? Their names are not known, their works bear no signatures, but the high craftsmanship of these scores clearly shows that they must have been engravers of extraordinary standards and inestimable patience, who spent years in apprenticeships to develop their skills. As was the case with most music publishers at this time, they would have worked in teams: A division of labor would have been established, in which senior engravers would have been responsible for the actual engraving work and junior engravers or apprentices for other peripheral responsibilities.
I am not entirely certain what engraving techniques were used at this time. Judging from the appearance of many of these scores, I believe that they used a technique known as “plate engraving,” or more specifically “punch engraving.” In this technique, a variety of tools are used to “punch” musical characters into copper or pewter plates. This was a slow, time-consuming process, which must have been dreadfully difficult with scores of such complexity. To add to the difficulty, the engravings were produced from right to left in mirror-image form, such that the image would be produced in its correct form when transferred to paper. Imagine the difficulty and the mental strain in typing a document in MS Word from right to left, instead of the customary left to right.
Inevitably, technology put an end to much of this labor. In the twenty-first century, music engravers are fortunate to have computers and software that can manage these tasks more quickly and efficiently and often with a cleaner, more elegant look (depending, of course, on the skill of the user). One person with a computer and engraving software can accomplish what a team of engravers did just as quickly, if not more quickly, since many of the cumbersome tasks of plate engraving are now automated (although a fair amount of mental work is still required). This ultimately means greater speed in production and lower costs.
As a means to understand some of the challenges these engravers faced, I thought it would be informative to engrave a segment from a UE score; more specifically, to typeset it in digital form, since my engraving career began long after the days of plate engraving. I chose one system, an intentionally challenging one, from the third page of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Klavierstücke No. 8, composed in 1954–55. The first image at the bottom of this blog entry is this system as it appears in the original publication.
The notation is highly complex, but the complexity can be justified by the musical intent. The piece is structured from three- and four-part counterpoint, with voices crossing between the hands and often crossing wide registers. Stockhausen’s notation clarifies the identity of the voices for the performer largely through beaming; hence, the need for an eighth-note beat. Additionally, the spacing of the beat (in non-reduced size) is nearly equidistant at 1.5 centimeters over the course of the system. No doubt this was the composer’s stipulation to the aid the performer in reading the music in the absence of bar lines. This engraving is elegant, clean, finely proportioned and admirably clear; it is aesthetically pleasing to the score-reader’s eye, despite the fact that certain notational conventions are no longer in use.
My rendition of this system, prepared in Score and duplicating as much of the original as possible, is the second image at the bottom of this entry.
The entire process for me from start to finish, including note input, editing and proofreading, required 90 minutes, an astronomical amount of time for typesetting a single system of piano music. Inevitably, the look is different in a variety of ways. For example, the horizontal spacing in the original cannot be matched exactly, since the wider shaped noteheads in the typeset version demand slightly more space. Given that the software freed me from handling numerous factors and calculations, it seems highly likely that the time required by the UE engravers to produce the original engraving would have been far greater. Days or weeks may have been needed to complete this relatively short piece comprising nine such systems.
This undertaking certainly extended my appreciation and admiration for the work of these engravers. The next time you study a score prepared by Universal Edition, or any music publisher for that matter, spare a moment to appreciate the fine work of the engravers who prepared the score. Many of them were first-class artisans, whose fine attention to detail was partly responsible for the success of the scores and their composers. And they all remain anonymous.
Postscript: Of course, I realize that I have committed a copyright infringement by including the example from the original publication. But I hope that amnesty is granted, since no profit will be made, and its inclusion here is a means of paying homage to those who produced it.
It is this period that is of particular interest in the firm’s history. What is remarkable is that hundreds, if not thousands of scores of these post-World War II composers were engraved and published, many scores, in fact, of exceptional notational complexity and originality. No work seems to have been refused because of its complexity. Scores such as Stockhausen’s Gruppen, Boulez’s Pli selon pli, Berio’s Coro and Sinfonia attest to UE’s willingness to engrave and publish that which might have met with instant rejection elsewhere. Profits from the sales of these scores most likely did not outweigh the production costs at the time, but presumably Schlee regarded these publications as financial investments for a future time.
Who were the persons who were responsible for engraving these formidable scores? Their names are not known, their works bear no signatures, but the high craftsmanship of these scores clearly shows that they must have been engravers of extraordinary standards and inestimable patience, who spent years in apprenticeships to develop their skills. As was the case with most music publishers at this time, they would have worked in teams: A division of labor would have been established, in which senior engravers would have been responsible for the actual engraving work and junior engravers or apprentices for other peripheral responsibilities.
I am not entirely certain what engraving techniques were used at this time. Judging from the appearance of many of these scores, I believe that they used a technique known as “plate engraving,” or more specifically “punch engraving.” In this technique, a variety of tools are used to “punch” musical characters into copper or pewter plates. This was a slow, time-consuming process, which must have been dreadfully difficult with scores of such complexity. To add to the difficulty, the engravings were produced from right to left in mirror-image form, such that the image would be produced in its correct form when transferred to paper. Imagine the difficulty and the mental strain in typing a document in MS Word from right to left, instead of the customary left to right.
Inevitably, technology put an end to much of this labor. In the twenty-first century, music engravers are fortunate to have computers and software that can manage these tasks more quickly and efficiently and often with a cleaner, more elegant look (depending, of course, on the skill of the user). One person with a computer and engraving software can accomplish what a team of engravers did just as quickly, if not more quickly, since many of the cumbersome tasks of plate engraving are now automated (although a fair amount of mental work is still required). This ultimately means greater speed in production and lower costs.
As a means to understand some of the challenges these engravers faced, I thought it would be informative to engrave a segment from a UE score; more specifically, to typeset it in digital form, since my engraving career began long after the days of plate engraving. I chose one system, an intentionally challenging one, from the third page of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Klavierstücke No. 8, composed in 1954–55. The first image at the bottom of this blog entry is this system as it appears in the original publication.
The notation is highly complex, but the complexity can be justified by the musical intent. The piece is structured from three- and four-part counterpoint, with voices crossing between the hands and often crossing wide registers. Stockhausen’s notation clarifies the identity of the voices for the performer largely through beaming; hence, the need for an eighth-note beat. Additionally, the spacing of the beat (in non-reduced size) is nearly equidistant at 1.5 centimeters over the course of the system. No doubt this was the composer’s stipulation to the aid the performer in reading the music in the absence of bar lines. This engraving is elegant, clean, finely proportioned and admirably clear; it is aesthetically pleasing to the score-reader’s eye, despite the fact that certain notational conventions are no longer in use.
My rendition of this system, prepared in Score and duplicating as much of the original as possible, is the second image at the bottom of this entry.
The entire process for me from start to finish, including note input, editing and proofreading, required 90 minutes, an astronomical amount of time for typesetting a single system of piano music. Inevitably, the look is different in a variety of ways. For example, the horizontal spacing in the original cannot be matched exactly, since the wider shaped noteheads in the typeset version demand slightly more space. Given that the software freed me from handling numerous factors and calculations, it seems highly likely that the time required by the UE engravers to produce the original engraving would have been far greater. Days or weeks may have been needed to complete this relatively short piece comprising nine such systems.
This undertaking certainly extended my appreciation and admiration for the work of these engravers. The next time you study a score prepared by Universal Edition, or any music publisher for that matter, spare a moment to appreciate the fine work of the engravers who prepared the score. Many of them were first-class artisans, whose fine attention to detail was partly responsible for the success of the scores and their composers. And they all remain anonymous.
Postscript: Of course, I realize that I have committed a copyright infringement by including the example from the original publication. But I hope that amnesty is granted, since no profit will be made, and its inclusion here is a means of paying homage to those who produced it.
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