The example allows me to define in a descriptive way the remarkable scale of the technological progress that has been made in the field of digital electronic music. One of the outstanding features of the MIT program in the field of electronic music was the application of mainframe computers to the task of perfecting electronic applications for music notation. It happened that computer music notation presented a far more difficult puzzle to solve than did the matter of simple text. The layout of musical notes on a score is far more intuitive and subtle in its application than the layout of letters and words. Indeed, it was many years after the invention and adoption of the PC before practical musical notation programs began to be seen on the market.
Today there are several professionally styled programs on the market.
I use such a program in my own work as a composer. I have come to regard writing on score-paper as very inconvenient and tedious. I use beautifully printed copies of my scores merely as a matter of course and as throwaways in the course of revisions. In knowledgeable hands, computer music software is capable of publishing completely professional and finished scores using conventional computer printers. I only want to demonstrate here what serves me as the equivalent of the traditional composer's sketch-book and manuscript.