Apparently this was an exercise book he made for a parisian tutee, who later fled the french revolution, leading to the confiscation of the notebook by the revolutionaries.
yayoohooyahoo 9 hours ago [-]
That's exactly what the article says... so yes apparently that's what it is
stinkbeetle 8 hours ago [-]
I have it on good authority that it is a handwritten notebook.
palmotea 8 hours ago [-]
> I have it on good authority that it is a handwritten notebook.
I'm suspicious. Didn't Mozart use a word processor?
I mean, not a PC program, that would be ridiculous, but one of those dedicated stand-alone word processor systems (like Smith-Corona made) that they used in ancient times.
CWuestefeld 7 hours ago [-]
One of my pet peeves is what seems to be an overwhelming desire in writers to always put an adjective in front of every noun. You can never just let it be a "notebook", it has to be some kind of notebook.
It's even worse in product naming and advertising. Nothing can be just "vanilla", you have to even put an adjective in front of your adjectives, like "Mexican vanilla".
EDIT: s/verb/noun/
loloquwowndueo 7 hours ago [-]
Rich Corinthian leather! My dude!
rob74 8 hours ago [-]
Note-book, as in "book containing musical notes". I expected a regular notebook (for the other kind of notes, that people like you and me might write)...
mpfect 13 hours ago [-]
Turns out "technical debt" also applies to national archives.
jfengel 6 hours ago [-]
More than you can possibly imagine. There are warehouses full of unread papers. Any one of which could contain a reference to somebody or something important.
There was a recently discovered letter, possibly to Shakespeare's wife, which would completely change our understanding of their marriage, and even the way his plays depict women. The only way to find such things is by hordes of grad students trudging their way through fragile paper and messy handwriting.
mmooss 4 hours ago [-]
I hate to say it, but might LLMs transform archival work? Not by replacing researchers, but by inputting everything (or orders of magnitude more than we could previously) and outputting to the researcher a prioritized list of documents / etc to examine?
lazyasciiart 2 hours ago [-]
The bottleneck is physical work, as I understand it. And primarily delicate physical work that does not destroy the already disintegrating materials that are piled up in boxes for miles.
If you could automate transcription, it would be an enormous boon to researchers.
Reading the handwriting would be really hard, and it would be a massive effort to move all that paper. Just handling it is hard; it's not like flipping through mass-manufactured books.
But I suspect that you could spend a few million dollars to revolutionize the field.
order-matters 2 hours ago [-]
>automate transcription
this also means trusting the LLM to decide what things mean. but there is very likely a great middle ground of having LLMs take their best guesses and then verifying the output on significant finds. the risk is in LLM understating something important, false negatives, leading to putting stuff at the bottom of the pile that appears mundane but isnt
kevin_thibedeau 1 hours ago [-]
This is already the case with genealogical sites that have ML OCR creating searchable indices of handwritten documents.
garlic_enjoyer 2 hours ago [-]
Assuming they have been transcribed, yes. The key idea that makes LLMs special is the attention mechanism. Maintaining attention over volumes of data is boring for most humans.
Also, to be pedantic, just taking about LLMs in this context is a tad reductive. There are many deep learning models involved in archival work that aren't language models.
I had ChatGPT translate some old, handwritten French legal documents for family history purposes. It was far more accurate than I expected.
At scale, with better models, we might have a way to clear out the old archives. Not only could you translate, you could ask it to triage the discoveries. "Would the average person find this noteworthy?"
contingencies 27 minutes ago [-]
I have a ton of handwritten German stuff from the 19th century. My grandmother could make a fair stab at it, but nobody left can read it. I've shown modern Germans and they are at a loss. Thanks for your idea, I will give it a look. Any tips on model/method/training?
computerdork 4 hours ago [-]
Oh, wow, that is actually an interesting application of ai
contingencies 28 minutes ago [-]
I found a copy of the oldest film ever shot in China in the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) library in London. The camera had been personally loaned to the French administrator in question by the Lumiere Brothers. The film had been entered in to the catalogue but nobody had looked at it in decades and they didn't have equipment to do so. The university wound up digitizing it with funds donated by the alumni and I was invited on my return from the US to address the alumni association on my research.
Mozart is among the most famous Western composers, and, like others of his stature, all his extant manuscripts have been cataloged and studied extensively. To find a previously unknown manuscript is a major event in that scholarship.
Mistletoe 4 hours ago [-]
They aren’t making more Mozart notebooks so probably.
I’m hoping that a full scan appears in the archive linked at the bottom of the page. I’m a composer and still hand-notate in a notebook. It’s so cool to the penmanship of someone writing in notebooks so quickly yet cleanly. In case you didn’t read, the contents are primarily exercises in composition where Mozart began a passage, the student continued, and Mozart corrected / guided the students work where needed. So there’s a higher percentage of Mozart in the pieces here than not. Like Brundlefly.
mrighele 12 hours ago [-]
I love his handwriting style. I wonder if it was the first draft or a copy [1]
Composers were also handwriting masters. Bach also had incredible handwriting, there's a youtube channel about it.
SoftTalker 6 hours ago [-]
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.
datakan 20 minutes ago [-]
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.
copperx 3 hours ago [-]
They spent more time in penmanship class than an individual grad student spent learning LaTeX in the pre-LLM time, for reference/scale.
spacechild1 5 hours ago [-]
Beethoven certainly wasn't.
breezybottom 9 hours ago [-]
You've named one composer who is. I don't see where the inductive step applies.
rob74 8 hours ago [-]
The composers who didn't have neat handwriting are forgotten today because nobody could read their (musical) notes...
Arainach 6 hours ago [-]
This is simply not true. Look at Beethoven's manuscripts for instance.
That's one of the reasons why he spent several years to write a single symphony.
globular-toast 6 hours ago [-]
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?
ternaryoperator 3 hours ago [-]
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).
Fritatta 4 hours ago [-]
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.
vixen99 2 hours ago [-]
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
8 hours ago [-]
JasonFruit 5 hours ago [-]
I see you've never worked your way through a manuscript by Donizetti.
K2Short 13 hours ago [-]
I hope we get to hear his new/old music. That would be amazing
nasso_dev 10 hours ago [-]
french radio "France Musique" aired it the other day, i don't know if its available outside of france though
mmmattt 8 hours ago [-]
It was also played live for Fête de la musique in Paris last Sunday.
Any time something of popular historical interest like this pops up I think about that.
If you've not read it then Robert Harris's (factual) book about the affair is entertaining, not least because such a broad sweep of dislikeable characters were undone by greed and folly!
spacechild1 5 hours ago [-]
The whole affair was bizarre. At one point Kujau, the author of the fake diaries, ran out of ideas and let Hitler complain about his flatulence.
There is also a very funny German movie about it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schtonk!) The director later said that he intentionally omitted some facts about the real scandal because the audience would find it too far fetched.
dcminter 4 hours ago [-]
I think my favourite aspect of the tale (at least as Harris tells it) is that Kujau was such a bad forger, and the recipients wanted it all to be true so badly that they skipped several opportunities to actually check!
I shall see if I can find Schtonk! with subtitles, sounds up my alley.
spacechild1 2 hours ago [-]
Yes! Like when Kujau couldn't get the letter A, so he went with "FH" instead of "AH" for the cover initials. Heidemann convinced the people at Stern that it surely stands for "Führer Hitler" :-D
Schtonk! does a really great job at satirizing the Führerkult that was still very much present in large parts of German society.
ggm 10 hours ago [-]
Confiscated during the revolution, kept by the national library. That's a bit different to "forged on schoolbooks with a Bic pen" provenance-wise.
pradeshhpatel 9 hours ago [-]
[flagged]
9 hours ago [-]
bell-cot 10 hours ago [-]
Even inside the tiny niche of the classical music history world, a book of daily exercises - written for some now-obscure student, and owned by a national library - is actually a pretty minor thing.
Very few counterfeiters bother doing nickles and dimes.
NopIdoN 6 hours ago [-]
BTW the metal in a nickel is worth about 7 cents.
estetlinus 9 hours ago [-]
> By coincidence, Goy had been looking at other documents Mozart had written for teaching just weeks earlier
Color me sceptical
bell-cot 8 hours ago [-]
He was a niche-specialty career archivist, sorting through his library's collection of stuff from the right era and area. That is the discovery story behind a rather large fraction of such documents.
estetlinus 7 hours ago [-]
So not much a coincidence I’d say. Very much by design.
nok22kon 8 hours ago [-]
parallel construction
kevinten10 8 hours ago [-]
[dead]
abstractspoon 6 days ago [-]
Anyone remember the Hitler diaries?
HugoMoran 4 hours ago [-]
seems like more of a minor discovery to me
alkyon 4 hours ago [-]
Seven previously unknown compositions for flute and harp is not minor
thrill 4 hours ago [-]
don't fret over dark keys
Rendered at 21:26:31 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Here is a more reputable article for this news story: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/22/arts/music/mozart-music-f...
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1333644/
This review doesn't spoil the movie https://www.theguardian.com/film/2026/jun/19/in-the-hand-of-...
Side note, imdb's per country rating histograms are mesmerizing https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1333644/ratings/ how different the Iranian ratings are vs the UK.
Tom Lehrer.
Lehrer did 97
FYI, most people speak the vast majority of their quotes before the day they die.
You stiffed Mozart!? A curse on your ghost!
I'm suspicious. Didn't Mozart use a word processor?
I mean, not a PC program, that would be ridiculous, but one of those dedicated stand-alone word processor systems (like Smith-Corona made) that they used in ancient times.
It's even worse in product naming and advertising. Nothing can be just "vanilla", you have to even put an adjective in front of your adjectives, like "Mexican vanilla".
EDIT: s/verb/noun/
There was a recently discovered letter, possibly to Shakespeare's wife, which would completely change our understanding of their marriage, and even the way his plays depict women. The only way to find such things is by hordes of grad students trudging their way through fragile paper and messy handwriting.
https://www.aaa.si.edu/documentation/digitizing-entire-colle...
Reading the handwriting would be really hard, and it would be a massive effort to move all that paper. Just handling it is hard; it's not like flipping through mass-manufactured books.
But I suspect that you could spend a few million dollars to revolutionize the field.
this also means trusting the LLM to decide what things mean. but there is very likely a great middle ground of having LLMs take their best guesses and then verifying the output on significant finds. the risk is in LLM understating something important, false negatives, leading to putting stuff at the bottom of the pile that appears mundane but isnt
Also, to be pedantic, just taking about LLMs in this context is a tad reductive. There are many deep learning models involved in archival work that aren't language models.
I encourage you to read into this post for more context on what I mean: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48675179
At scale, with better models, we might have a way to clear out the old archives. Not only could you translate, you could ask it to triage the discoveries. "Would the average person find this noteworthy?"
https://youtu.be/wk-sIeh7BcI?si=188fGFMD_f3DrkXP
https://www.bnf.fr/en/actualitesEN/discovery-unpublished-aut...
I’m hoping that a full scan appears in the archive linked at the bottom of the page. I’m a composer and still hand-notate in a notebook. It’s so cool to the penmanship of someone writing in notebooks so quickly yet cleanly. In case you didn’t read, the contents are primarily exercises in composition where Mozart began a passage, the student continued, and Mozart corrected / guided the students work where needed. So there’s a higher percentage of Mozart in the pieces here than not. Like Brundlefly.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gkqfpkTTy2w
I can imagine that in the time of Bach or Mozart that writing was a big point of emphasis in schools.
"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.
https://guides.loc.gov/beethoven/manuscripts
https://youtu.be/wk-sIeh7BcI?si=188fGFMD_f3DrkXP
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitler_Diaries
If you've not read it then Robert Harris's (factual) book about the affair is entertaining, not least because such a broad sweep of dislikeable characters were undone by greed and folly!
There is also a very funny German movie about it (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schtonk!) The director later said that he intentionally omitted some facts about the real scandal because the audience would find it too far fetched.
I shall see if I can find Schtonk! with subtitles, sounds up my alley.
Schtonk! does a really great job at satirizing the Führerkult that was still very much present in large parts of German society.
Very few counterfeiters bother doing nickles and dimes.
Color me sceptical