page_title: Autograph (manuscript)
section_title: Terminology
hierarchical_section_title: Autograph (manuscript) / Terminology
caption_attribution_description: English: Beethoven ninth symphony manuscript
context_page_description: An autograph or holograph is a manuscript or document written in its author's or composer's hand. The meaning of autograph as a document penned entirely by the author of its content, as opposed to a typeset document or one written by a copyist or scribe other than the author, overlaps with that of holograph.
  Autograph manuscripts are studied by scholars, and can become collectable objects. Holographic documents have, in some jurisdictions, a specific legal standing.
context_section_description: According to The Oxford English Minidictionary, an autograph is, apart from its meaning as signature, a "manuscript in the author's handwriting," while a holograph is a "(document) written wholly in the handwriting of the person in whose name it appears."
  In an article written by Edward Maunde Thompson, the 1911 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica mentions "a document signed by the person from whom it emanates" as another common meaning of the word "autograph", supported by various examples from antiquity to the Middle Ages when a document, usually written by a scribe different from the author, became "signed" or "autographed" by the person who attached his seal (= signum, origin of the word signature) to it. According to Thompson's article on autographs, when the entire document is written by the hand of the person from whom it emanates, it can technically also be called a holograph.
  In Webster's Third New International Dictionary, the definitions are:
  ¹autograph
  1: something that is written with one's own hand: a: an original handwritten manuscript (as of an author's or composer's work) ⟨valuable old ~s of Dickens⟩ [p. 147]
  ¹holograph
  : a document (as a letter, deed, or will) wholly in the handwriting of the person from whom it proceeds and whose act it purports to be [p. 1081]
  According to Stanley Boorman in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians:
  Holograph
  A document written in the hand of the author or composer. This distinguishes it from the more commonly used word, Autograph, for the latter, strictly, means merely that the document is written by someone who can be named.
  The author of the Grove article clarifies with an example, stating that Johann Sebastian Bach's autographs include as well the manuscripts he wrote of his own compositions as the copies he made of compositions by other composers, and that the same can be said about his son Carl Philipp Emanuel, whose autographs include his holographs, and, for instance, the manuscript copies he made of compositions by his father.
  According to Yo Tomita, writing in The Routledge Research Companion to Johann Sebastian Bach, "autograph" and "holograph" can be considered synonyms (i.e., a manuscript for which the writer is the author of the work), the former term being generally preferred in studies of manuscripts. Further, he writes that Bach's copies of compositions by other composers "should never be referred to as Bach's autographs, even if they are entirely in Bach's handwriting." He distinguishes two types of partial autographs: the first being written by a set of scribes, among whom the composer, the second being a copy made by a scribe other than the composer, to which the composer, in a later stage, applied editorial corrections and/or other modifications. According to this author, manuscripts of straightforward transcriptions should be referred to as "copy" or "transcription manuscript", while more convoluted arrangements should rather be referred to as "autograph" than "copy". In Bach-scholarship "original manuscript" refers to a score or performance parts written (by himself or his scribes) for the composer's own use.
  In what follows the terms "autograph" and "holograph" are used as quoted in the sources indicated by the footnoted references. When these sources only use a description, such as "in the author's handwriting" or "written in the hand of the author", then, following Webster's, "autograph" is used for a "manuscript (as of an author's or composer's work)" and "holograph" for a "document (as a letter, deed, or will)", and either of these terms only when the explicitly named scribe of the manuscript or document is also the creator of its content. For instance:
  If the RISM page used as reference for the (D-B) Mus.ms. Bach P 180 manuscript describes that object as an "autograph" (by Johann Sebastian Bach), then that qualification is not changed to holograph: the context is clear, i.e. written and composed by J. S. Bach, even if this handwritten score was, in 1786, partially altered and completed for performance by the composer's son C. P. 
caption: Beethoven's final score of his ninth symphony: partial autograph, of the "non-autograph copy with autograph corrections" type.[7]
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