Hacker News Reader

Comment by coliveira | Hacker News Reader

Composers were also handwriting masters. Bach also had incredible handwriting, there's a youtube channel about it.

Schools used to spend a lot of time on penmanship. I visited a high school where they had a wall of notes left by each senior class. In the notes from the 1950s the writing was quite refined and looked very practiced, and notes left by kids in the 2020s looked like 2nd grade printing by comparison. I don't think cursive handwriting is really even taught/required anymore.

I can imagine that in the time of Bach or Mozart that writing was a big point of emphasis in schools.

They spent more time in penmanship class than an individual grad student spent learning LaTeX in the pre-LLM time, for reference/scale.

Cursive is only useful for fountain pens. It was a sign of its times and is totally pointless and even counterproductive today. I get really sick of people exclaiming how important cursive is today when everyone types and everything is printed.

"Back in my day we taught the kids cursive!!" How many of them used fountain pens? I'm guessing zero. You just wasted their time instead of teaching them something valuable.

> I'm guessing zero.

There’s your problem: guessing.

Knowing how to write cursive is a useful skill even if underutilised, heck, it’s a useful skill even if just for the artistry of it. It might be niche, it might be unnecessary, but saying it is a “waste of time” is just ridiculous.

> Knowing how to write cursive is a useful skill

No, it's not. At all

Spoken like a true child of the internet. Well done.

It actually is. Very much so.

Cursive was and still is a fast way to write by hand. If you want to be illiterate without a computer, then you don't want to learn handwriting. But if you don't want to be illiterate without a computer, learning cursive is a fast and efficient way to do it.

Literacy and cursive have nothing to do with each other.

It’s a bit disingenuous of you to try and claim this when you have basically no understanding of the use of cursive nowadays. Not sure if you’re just a kid out of high school proclaiming rebel knowledge of domains you know nothing about, or just a really disingenuous person with a terrible case of arrogance, either way, you really ought to stop and reevaluate some of your positions—they are depressingly wrong.

In the town where I live there are buildings from a 19th century pipe organ factory. My wife used to work in one of the buildings. The employees had scribbled various names and dates and witticisms on the walls in pencil. Their handwriting was beautiful. I was gratified that no one had thought to beautify the walls after the factory closed. In the loft above there were ancient mechanical drawings of organ parts rolled up and stored on racks, and at the end of the loft was a designer's desk still waiting for him to come back and make more drawings.

You've named one composer who is. I don't see where the inductive step applies.

The composers who didn't have neat handwriting are forgotten today because nobody could read their (musical) notes...

This is simply not true. Look at Beethoven's manuscripts for instance.

https://guides.loc.gov/beethoven/manuscripts

Wow. Can we even be sure we're listening to the right thing? Is it actually possible to read this unambiguously or is there an element of context when reading music, similar to how if you're reading prose the next word is probably grammatically correct and makes sense?

Exactly. The context makes it all pretty clear. Music has its own grammar, and particularly music of the common practice era from about 1650-1930.

The publisher was generally familiar with Beethoven’s writing and conventions. He’d prepare galleys that Beethoven would proof (and frequently edit). A substantial part of Beethoven’s known correspondence concerns corrections to galleys (and managing payments).

That's one of the reasons why he spent several years to write a single symphony.

What? What does one thing have to do with the other? Heck, what is up with everyone here just making up bullshit arguments about classical composers? The heck is this nonsense!?

You can check all this out for yourself at IMSL. Tons of holograph copies there for lots of composers. https://imslp.org/wiki/Main_Page

Such as famously the forgotten composer Ludwig von Beethoven.

Please, let’s leave the made up arguments to the LLMs.

Beethoven certainly wasn't.

I see you've never worked your way through a manuscript by Donizetti.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com