Letter stock 8 1/2x11, legal 8 1/2 x 14, and tabloid 11x17 are the three standard US sizes.
Which genius decided to use 9 1/4 x 12 for sheet music? Its a real nuisance to file. The extra width (9 1/4") is the biggest PITA. It’s too wide even for legal size pocket folders.
Just from plain economics. Wouldn’t using standard stock paper save money? Why create and manufacture a non standard paper size just for the sheet music industry? Wouldn’t that require special printers too?
Don’t blame the metric system. Sheet music came in this odd size 60 years ago. Long before the metric system had a chance to screw up the standard paper sizes.
my filing solution
I found some extra large pocket folders at Office Depot.Sheet music fits really well. It sticks out about a 1/4 inch at the top. I store the pocket folders in large, single pocket accordion files. Adding more organization and it protects the exposed top edge of the sheet music.
Velcro tape gives a way to secure the pocket folders closed. A 1x1 square is all that’s needed.
Not perfect, but nobody seems to sell pocket folders designed for sheet music. I am very glad to have a way to protect and organize my sheet music and still keep it portable for travel.
This wouldn’t work for original sheet music, but back when I was collecting (mostly old) songs, I would copy them from the library. Mostly I could fit the music on a regular letter size paper just by positioning the original on the copier to crop the top and one side; if necessary, and if the copier had the option, I could also reduce it a little to fit.
I know this isn’t what you’re asking, so in order to make up for posting the first reply as just an anecdote, here are a few links to other answers:
Apparently it has to do with the way sheet music is printed and cut, not one page at a time, but like a book in large sheets which are then cut, collated and glued or sewn together. So it has to do with standard paper sizes for printing in that manner, rather than sizes we use for office work.
It seems that standard sizes, on either side of the Atlantic, don’t work too well for music, especially if you have to hold it (as with a choir). Letter or A4 are both too narrow and make things awkward for the user.
As you note, there is centuries of tradition behind it all and Octavo size is a throwback to those days when sizes were described as folio, quarto, octavo, and so on, depending on how many folds were made in the basic large sheet. There was no standard for the basic sheet and it varied from mill to mill. Standard sizes are relatively recent but even then Europe, The americas, Japan and China all use different standards although the basic aspect ratio of root 2 is something of a constant because if you halve it, the halves still have the same ratio and so on.
I guess it’s not reasonable to expect modern office filing to work well with music printed based on centuries old procedures.
I’m not even sure how long modern office paper and files have been in place. I’d guess it was from about the time typewriters became common. Standard stock paper seems to go hand in hand with typewriters.
Paper of course has been around since papyrus. Just in a different format and size. Good luck getting a scroll of paper in a typewriter. LOL
I sourced and purchased a HP inkjet printer that handled tabloid for my boss. It did ok, but often didn’t print straight. The paper didn’t feed exactly right. That’s a big sheet of paper for a printer’s rollers to handle.
btw, that was a HP1120C Inkjet. purchased around 1998. I think we retired it around 2006.
handled big paper. but as I said. if the paper moved side to side, it didn’t print straight. Never could eliminate that problem. The 11x17 paper is just too big.
I have an old manual typewriter in the loft with a wide carriage that takes A3 - that is it takes A4 in landscape. It was used for typing booklets by manually judging two columns and folding in half. Took a good typist to do that.
The DoD used 8"x10" paper for all office work until about 1985. And had correspondingly undersized 3-ring binders, file folders, pocket folders, filing cabinets, etc.
With the widespread adoption of PCs and dot-matrix printers they finally admitted defeat on having their own private size of paper and went to 8-1/2" x 11".
Which necessitated buying an awful lot of re-sized ancillary furniture, equipment, and supplies.
Thing is, we were always given copies in high school band, and the music always fit on standard paper. It seems the extra space is mostly margins or something.
Reading music is very different from reading text. Music is often on a piano or music stand, or held while singing. It needs large margins, and the music needs to be large enough to read from a distance. But if it were on 8.5x11 paper, not enough of it would fit on each page, necessitating more frequent page turns. Larger paper, and page turning would become too cumbersome. These issues, and others, have been worked out over centuries, long before today’s paper sizes became standard for other purposes. Music publishers know what they’re doing.
My Epson R2880 has no trouble printing my 13x19 prints, every time. 1998 was ancient history.
Maybe a Canon laser printer would do better? I worked at a Silicon Gulch company in the mid-1980’s that build laser printer systems, when that was still a new golly-whiz technology. We had a floor-standing Canon model that would do large paper sizes like this, and could print double-sided too – all at a sustained rate of 20 sides per minute! Way back around 1985.
We had a prototype, built around a Kodak copier, that would do 90 pages a minute!
Fast forward a few years. The technology became established; new technologies like inkjet came; and everything got really cheap and shitty. What printers today can do 20 sides per minute (let alone 90), double-sided, and large sheet sizes?
My guess is they want to reduce the ease of photocopying sheet music on standard 8 1/2 x 11 paper. I still manage to photocopy songs out of my music books, but the placement is inexact so I have to set aside the misprints, where either the top or bottom of the music page gets chopped off, and request that I don’t get charged for them.
Standard music for use in studios in the 1950-80 era at least was 13"x19" for diazo (ammonia repro) or 12.5 x 19 for manuscript (not duplicated).
In industrial printing, there are “parent” sizes that are cut into smaller pieces either before or after printing. One common parent size for the kind of paper used for music is 38 x 25. Note that it cuts exactly into 4 parts of 19x12.5. I’m pretty sure that explains one size.
Printers typically “double cut” large sheets by trimming off a small edge slice. This is done because a trim gives a cleaner edge than a stack of paper that may have gained some edge damage during storage and transport. The only reason I can think of that music printers don’t do this is to gain a little more space, and music needs it.
Diazo repro was used before Xerox machines became affordable, and you can feed a multiple-page sheet of almost unlimited width thru a diazo machine. Not so for most Xerox.
However, since most of my work was done for publishers, where office xerox machines were common, I started writing the music for them on 8.5 x 11. They were much happier with that size.
As far as commercial music is concerned, if you are doing quantity printing, size isn’t important. Most large presses work on very large sheets or rolls, and the finished product can be cut to any size. Think of how many different sizes there are of books.
If you’re looking for an easier, portable way to file your sheet music, check out the scrapbook section of a big box craft store. You can get a 12"X12" accordion case that would work.