First Printed Music Published in Germany

1465

The earliest known printed music with movable type appeared in a German liturgical book, using Gutenberg's revolutionary technology to set musical notation alongside text on the same printed page. The mechanization of music publishing would gradually transform how compositions circulated across European borders, enabling the great polyphonic revolution of the sixteenth century and the careers of Josquin and Palestrina. Sound itself was being encoded in standardized ink on an industrial scale.