Composers Who Used Fountain Pens

[thewolfgang]

I am writing an article about fountain pens and classical music:

 

 

1. Considerations when choosing nibs, inks and music paper

2. Pens and inks named after composers

3. Any relevant or irrelevant trivia

4. Composers who used fountain pens before the digital takeover - Stravinsky did, I'm told - or who still do

 

While researching this article conductor Nicholas McGegan said that Beethoven, when he chose the quills he used, looked for "a quill from the left wing of a goose. If you use a feather from the right wing, it will go straight up your nose as your write."

 

Also, could you please help identify the nib in the attached photo. It's on an old Montblanc a composer friend of mine still uses to mark the galleys of his scores.

 

Thanks,

 

Laurence

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

[Tom Kellie]

~ thewolfgang:

 

Your article in process sounds very interesting.

The nib image above is fairly small, lacking much detail.

Were a larger image possible, it would help with accurate identification.

Tom K.

[Misfit]

I imagine you know that Diamine and De Atramentis have inks named for composers. I have Wagner in both brands, including one mislabeled by De Atramentis in the wrong color (should be marone, but was silver gray).

Edited January 22, 2020 by Misfit

[thewolfgang]

~ thewolfgang:

 

Your article in process sounds very interesting.

The nib image above is fairly small, lacking much detail.

Were a larger image possible, it would help with accurate identification.

Tom K.

 

I'll try to get a better image - thanks

[thewolfgang]

Is this enough better?

[BaronWulfraed]

While researching this article conductor Nicholas McGegan said that Beethoven, when he chose the quills he used, looked for "a quill from the left wing of a goose. If you use a feather from the right wing, it will go straight up your nose as your write."

Well, he apparently scored music using his left hand, so using a quill that curves left makes sense.

 

 

BTW: all I see is a black box for the followup nib photo

Edited January 22, 2020 by BaronWulfraed

[Tom Kellie]

Is this enough better?

 

~ thewolfgang:

 

What shows on my screen is a black box.

No image.

Tom K.

[Parker51]

On Jan. 17, 1940 Leonard Bernstein wrote his friend Kenneth Ehrman about “a series of minor catastrophes of varying kinds"; “I left a valuable manuscript of Copland’s plus another printed piece of his plus a valuable manuscript book of mine plus a valuable fountain pen plus all my thesis notes [emphasis in the original] over which I had theoretically slaved (!) in New York on the train coming back from that City of Sin. The infallible New Haven Railroad is unable to find these things, which means that I must start my thesis all over again at double speed […] and be generally upset at having lost Aaron’s manuscript for him.”

I don't know if you consider Leonard Bernstein a classical composer, but that letter suggests he used a Fountain pen.

 

Please indicate your parameters.

[Parker51]

Hello, I suggest you review and reference in your writing something someone else has already wrote which touches on your subject: Manuscripts, Pens and Composers by Jeffrey Dane.

A Google search will pull it up for you.

[Miskatonic]

"Composers who used fountain pens before the digital takeover..."

 

Do you mean composers who wrote before computers became widely available for score notation?

 

The advent of the fountain pen in popular use was what, the 1850's roughly? So that's the middle of the Romantic period. Fountain pens continued to be made but fell out of favor post WW II and computers as a viable composition aid was late 1980's early 1990's. I would think your sweet spot for fountain pens and classical composers will be 1860-1955.

 

Pull all the famous composers of that frame (there are plenty) and search "fountain pen" I guess? Or maybe backwards from "Music Nib" since some manufacturers may have had direct contact with their more famous customers. Some composers (and conductors) became famous enough in their own lifetimes that, coinciding with the dawn of modern advertising, there may have be some brand endorsements. You never know.

 

Composition habits (lots of revisions, composed in the head, edited after premiers, etc) are typically of more interest to music historians than the implements they used, so you might need to really dig in the weeds of history books to find your goal.

 

Good luck.

[thewolfgang]

Well, he apparently scored music using his left hand, so using a quill that curves left makes sense.

 

 

BTW: all I see is a black box for the followup nib photo

 

I just received a clarification from McGegan - No. He was right-handed. The goose feather has to be from the left wing so that the tip of the feather points away from the person writing. C P E Bach was the only composer I know of who was certainly left-handed.

 

I'll try to reattach the nib image

[thewolfgang]

Still fuzzy but the best I could get

Thanks for your collective patience

[thewolfgang]

Thanks for all the great feedback -

 

Miskatonic - you've started me off in an entirely new direction - I had forgotten fountain pens were so old -

 

Parker51 - thanks for the Dane recommendation - and yes Leonard Bernstein wrote a lot of totally classical music -

 

In the meantime I found another: the American composer Henry Cowell

 

Laurence

[TassoBarbasso]

FPs were not around until Watermans 1884 invention. And did not become a mass product until the 1890s. You wont find any Romantic composer using FPs. Maybe some proto-FPs but I would find it highly unlikely as they were notoriously unreliable: they were more like gimmick products. Most people used quills or steel nib pens (in fact, in most countries steel dip pens remained the go-to way to write anything until well into the 1920s).

[max dog]

Still fuzzy but the best I could get

Thanks for your collective patience

Based on the existence of an ink window, and two toned 14K nib, it looks to me like a Montblanc 146 LeGrand.

Edited January 24, 2020 by max dog

[Tom Kellie]

Based on the existence of an ink window, and two toned 14K nib, it looks to me like a Montblanc 146 LeGrand.

 

~ max dog:

 

That's what it looks like to me.

Tom K.

[thewolfgang]

Thanks again everyone -

[Miskatonic]

FPs were not around until Watermans 1884 invention. And did not become a mass product until the 1890s. You wont find any Romantic composer using FPs.

Doesn't this surge in mass production of steel nibs point to a popular adoption of fountain pens by mid 19th century? Were these nibs being placed into pens that were not technically considered "fountain pens"?

 

From Wikapedia-

In 1828, Josiah Mason improved a cheap and efficient slip-in nib in Birmingham, England, which could be added to a fountain pen and in 1830, with the invention of a new machine.....a way to mass manufacture robust, cheap steel pen nibs .... by the 1850s, more than half the steel-nib pens manufactured in the world were made in Birmingham. Thousands of skilled craftsmen were employed in the industry.....the city's factories mass-produced their pens cheaply and efficiently. These were sold worldwide to many who previously could not afford to write, thus encouraging the development of education and literacy.

[bemon]

Could be a MB 146.

[TassoBarbasso]

Doesn't this surge in mass production of steel nibs point to a popular adoption of fountain pens by mid 19th century? Were these nibs being placed into pens that were not technically considered "fountain pens"?

 

From Wikapedia-

In 1828, Josiah Mason improved a cheap and efficient slip-in nib in Birmingham, England, which could be added to a fountain pen and in 1830, with the invention of a new machine.....a way to mass manufacture robust, cheap steel pen nibs .... by the 1850s, more than half the steel-nib pens manufactured in the world were made in Birmingham. Thousands of skilled craftsmen were employed in the industry.....the city's factories mass-produced their pens cheaply and efficiently. These were sold worldwide to many who previously could not afford to write, thus encouraging the development of education and literacy.

No. The opposite is true in fact. FPs started to replace the steel nib. What we mean by pen with reference to steel nibs is just a nib holder.

 

With the rise of mass schooling during the XIX century, steel nibs became the go-to way to teach people to write. They were used by slipping them into nib holders, usually wooden. They remained very widespread well into the XX cent. My dad for example still used steel nibs and ink bottles at school in the late 1950s.

 

Parallel to that you have the development of proto-fountain-pens: a number of patents for over-complicated mechanisms that were supposed to avoid the issue of dipping the nib in the ink. Tens of inventors tried multiple solutions, usually entailing an ink reservoir connected to the nib with some complex mix of tubes and valves. None of these worked. They were all incredibly unreliable, more gimmick than anything good. These intricate devices never went into mass production and always remained a minuscule part of the writing tools market.

 

Enter L. E. Waterman, who, in 1884, invented a solution that changed everything: instead of tubes and stuff, he connected the nib to the ink reservoir using a feed, exactly like the ones we use nowadays. The FP was born

 

Does this mean that he had any use for the mass-made steel nibs that dominated the market? Not at all. First, the steel nib is disposable: you used it and tossed it away if it bent, wore out, or corroded with the ink. A FP however required the nib to be

 

1) Fixed to the pen indefinitely,

2) Able to resist corrosion due to permanent contact with the ink in the feed (at that time inks were highly acidic), and

3) Tipped with smth hard enough that it would not wear out after a couple of years of use.

 

Hence the need to use gold nibs (or gold-plated nibs, at least) tipped with iridium.

 

The FP therefore has nothing to do with the steel nibs. Even at the peak of their popularity, FPs never were as popular as the steel-nibbed dip pen. Or the humble pencil, for that matter The two things occupied different niches of the market and one was useless to the other.

 

Then in the 1940s came the invention of cheap injection plastic and it became possible to make super cheap FP. This is how student pens were born. But then came the ballpoint pen and most of the FP manufacturers went out of business anyway

 

So in a nutshell, no Romantic composer can have used a FP as they did not exist. Maybe some late XIX- early XX century ones?