📚 Musical Notation

Writing sound down: staff origins, the printing history, and the experimental systems that tried to replace it.

Below are the 30 works carrying the subject musical notation in the Open Library catalogue with the most editions in print. Author and first year are as the record states them; a missing year means the record does not carry one, not that the book is undated. Novels set in the subject are left out, because a list of historical fiction is not a list of history. Where one author dominates the reprint counts, no more than two of their titles appear.

Cover	Title	Author	First published	Editions
	The story of notation	Charles Francis Abdy Williams	1903	16
	Mathematics and music	James S. Walker	2013	12
	A chronology of the works of Guillaume Dufay	Charles Hamm	1960	10
	Fundamentals of music	Earl Henry	2009	10
	Music notation	Gardner Read	1964	9
	Fundamentals of music	Earl Henry	1988	9
	The Best of Fleetwood Mac	Fleetwood Mac	1992	9
	The notation of polyphonic music, 900-1600	Willi Apel	1942	8
	The notation of medieval music	Carl Parrish	1957	8
	Introduction to music fundamentals	J. Austin Andrews	1964	8
	The new music	Reginald Smith Brindle	1975	7
	The notation of Western music	Richard Rastall	1982	7
	Musical handwriting	Archibald Jacob	1937	6
	Preparing music manuscript	Anthony Donato	1963	6
	The art of music copying	Clinton Roemer	1973	5
	Music notation	Mark McGrain	1986	5
	Frank Sinatra - Nothing but the Best	Frank Sinatra	2008	5
	Moments Majestique	Kevin Kaisershot	2009	5
	An essay to the advancement of musick	Salmon, Thomas	1672	4
	Music notation and terminology	Gehrkens, Karl Wilson	1914	4
	Musikalische Schrifttafeln für den Unterricht in der Notationskunde	Johannes Wolf	1923	4
	Learning to read music	Robert Lilienfeld	1968	4
	Grapes	William Y. Elias	1983	4
	How to Read Music	Terry Burrows	1999	4
	Finale	Thomas E. Rudolph	2001	4
	David Lanz - Cristofori's Dream ... Re-Envisioned	David Lanz	2012	4
	Creative Christmas Carols	Gail Smith	2012	4
	Musikalische Elementarlehre	Bussler, Ludwig	1876	3
	Die mensuralnoten und Taktzeichen des XV. und XVI. Jahrhunderts	Heinrich Bellermann	1906	3
	Die Ornamentik der Musik	Adolf Beyschlag	1908	3

List built from Open Library (CC0 metadata) · retrieved 03 Nov 2026 UTC · capped at 30 works per subject.

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