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A recent interesting project was to prepare the performing material for a reconstruction of the first peformance of Handel’s Water Music for BBC television. While this could have been done by writing the music by hand, the difficulty was that musical handwriting has changed greatly since 1717, so this would have looked like an exercise in calligraphy rather than the work of a copyist writing at speed.

Instead I wrote a musical font which mimics the handwriting of Handel’s long-time copyist J. C. Smith. Usually each occurrence of a given character in a font will look the same, but here I took advantage is some PostScript subtleties to ensure that each occurrence of the same character is different, and that the random variation mimic’s Smith’s variations. There are also other elements of randomness in the typography which mean that slurs, stems and beams all vary.

Here are some sample pages:

score, p.1

score, p.17

score, p.23

score, p.44

score, p.67

The latest new project is a fascinating piece of book design.