SCORE is a scorewriter program, written in FORTRAN for MS-DOS by Stanford University Professor Leland Smith (1925–2013) with a reputation for producing very high-quality results. It was widely used in engraving during the 1980s and 1990s and continues to have a small, dedicated following of engravers, many of whom hold the program in high regard due to its ability to position symbols precisely on the page. Several publications set using SCORE have earned Paul Revere and German Musikpresse engraving awards.
Program development
Mainframe origins
The first incarnation of SCORE was written by Leland Smith in 1967 as a means of entering music into the MUSIC V sound generating system running on the PDP-10 mainframe computers at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (SAIL).
The core concept of SCORE was to break music into a set of items ('objects' in modern terminology) with parameters that describe their characteristics. In this example of an early SCORE routine the beginnings of the parameter system (P2, P3 etc.) can be seen: BUZZ; P2 RHY/4/2/8//REP 3,2//; DF 1000.2; P3 NOTES/P C4/B/C/O B3/C/FINE; P4 LIT/P3%2/!-52; P5 .2 10,100 .4 200,210 .2 1,1; P6 -9999.5; P7 1000; P8 FU/1/2//; END;
As vector graphics terminals became available in the early 1970s, the parametric approach to describing musical information that had been designed for MUSIC V was adapted by Smith into a program he called MSS (the standard abbreviation for manuscripts) for printing musical scores. The graphics plotters used for output were not able to plot curves so MSS did not use music fonts as they are understood today, instead using user-editable symbol libraries based on polygons, and text was generated from an internal character set.
The first printing of a complete musical work set entirely by computer was of Smith's Six Bagatelles for Piano which appeared in December 1971, printed at 100dpi on a CalComp plotter and reduced by a factor of five for printing at 8.5"x11". Smith's Woodwind Trio was published using this system in 1973 and Richard Swift, reviewing it for Notes, drew attention to the 'admirable clarity and ease of reading for performer and score reader, easily equivalent to the finest examples of contemporary music printing by other means. This new process claims the serious attention of commercial music publishers for its fine qualities, not the least of which is ease and cheapness of production.'
The first book about music typeset entirely by computer to be published was his Handbook of Harmonic Analysis in 1979, created on the PDP-10 computer at SAIL using the PUB typesetting program (for more information see External links) in conjunction with MSS. The printing was done at double size on a Varian Data Machines Statos electrostatic plotter and then optically reduced by a factor of two for lithographic printing.
From its creation until 1985, all development of MSS was either done on the PDP-10 computers at Stanford or during residencies at IRCAM in the Pompidou Centre, Paris.
Commercial development
Between 1985 and 1986 MSS was ported to the Tandy 2000 running MS-DOS under its earlier name of SCORE. Since personal computers of the time had limited memory (usually around 640KB), SCORE was limited to 32 staves and 1420 items per file. In order to handle complex or lengthy works, users had to work on small portions of the score at any one time, naming their files sequentially. These were then laid out and tiled together before being sent to the printer. In order to save memory further on graphics operations, notation was displayed in 'stick figure' characters and symbols (see first screenshot in Editing music graphically/numerically), which showed exactly the boundaries of the notation but lacked fine detail. There was an option to display the true symbols provided there was enough memory remaining to accommodate them (see Pass 2 screenshot in Entering music symbolically).
SCORE version 1 was released in 1987 by Passport Designs and updated to version 2 in August 1988. The German music publisher Schott Music began using SCORE in 1988 and their in-house engraving typefaces became the basis for SCORE's symbol library. Version 2 also introduced the use of PostScript Type 1 fonts for page text.
In 1988, Passport Designs sent their programmer Perry Devine to work with Smith to make the program more user-friendly. They also hired professional engraver William Holab (music editor at G. Schirmer, Inc.) to rewrite the manuals, resulting in the release of version 3.0 in 1990.
The SCORE music publishing system is made up of the main program, SCORE, and these associated utilities: