A few weeks ago I decided to buy some new music. More specifically, I needed a more difficult collection of relatively short pieces to use for practice sight reading during my occasional bouts of piano playing. After consulting a variety of online piano forums and blogs, I settled on purchasing a copy of the Henle Album from the fine folks at G Henle Verlag. It's a steal at about $10, it's beautifully engraved, and it's meticulously edited.

Prior to this purchase, I had never so much as heard of Henle. (Relatively speaking, I'm not an especially talented pianist, and so I don't have a whole lot of exposure to the world of music publishers.) So I spent a few minutes poking around their website to learn, for one, what it meant that everything they sold was labeled as "urtext."

I also learned that as recently as 2000, Henle hand engraved all of their sheet music. That is, as recently as ten years ago — at about the same time I purchased my first digital camera — Henle still employed people who cut lines, staffs, sharps and other musical notation into sheets of lead with delicate metal instruments to produce printed sheet music. In fact, they still have a short film on their website documenting the process. It's almost unbelievable.

On the one hand, the fact that the company stuck to their now-antiquated methods of production for so long makes me wonder about the company's management. But on the other, there is something remarkable about a company so committed to producing the most elegant, most functional printed music that they would keep employing people to engrave music by hand, in spite of the emergence of digital publishing tools.