From manual marks to the full score – how sheet music was invented

Although music was part of the Ancient Egyptian culture, the only way our ancestors had of writing down the notes were their individual hand-drawn notations. Even through the centuries that followed, musicians and singers shared tunes by passing along non-uniform representations. It wasn’t until the 11th century that a monk began to develop a uniform way of recording tunes at a set pitch which didn’t require a performer familiar with the melody to reproduce it. But the full scores of the late Romantic period and a quick sketch of a pop song on music paper were still a long way away.