 Before the invention of the phonograph in 1887, music relied on the same technology of recording and preservation used for literature. Music could be written down and copied by hand, circulated widely in printed form. It could be annotated, kept in libraries, discarded, and much, much more. But performances could not yet be preserved as sounds. The 19th century was a period that saw a huge expansion in music consumption, printing techniques became more affordable and varied. For instance, it was possible to produce printed copies of something that had been unwritten on paper with a special ink. The process was called transfer lithography. It was not quite as seamless as using a photocopy machine, but the results were similar. Printed music was also made more accessible by new distribution infrastructures, such as macadamized roads and steam-powered railways. This was also an age of renewed efforts in popular education, ensuring that more and more people could read what was being printed, copied, and distributed in ever larger quantities. While we may imagine the 19th century as an era of ubiquitous music, people of the time often described it so, what they meant certainly did not resemble our experience today of going from one space to another with speakers almost in every corner, without recording technology in order to exist as sound music had to be performed live by someone. Concerts, especially large public ones, were expensive to put on, so concertgoers did not constitute the majority of music consumers in this period. Most people interested in this art form would buy sheet music, or copy it by hand, to perform themselves at home, often in the company of family and friends. It was quite common for people to collect autograph signatures of their favorite composers and authors, whether originals or in facsimile prints made with transfer lithography. The origins of today's mass music consumption happened in paper form, exchanged, bought, handled with care or the exact opposite, easily distributed and reaching far away people and places. Even those who attended public concert could purchase programs or portable scores to read during the events, which helped them remain focused on the listening experience or simply gave them something to live through so as not to get bored. Before the 20th century, when sound technology and later screen media took over, being interested in music meant first and foremost handling it in written forms. Perhaps precisely because handling music was so central, it took different shapes and could be a more invested act than we tend to assume, going beyond the functionality of simply reading notes on the page or playing them. One telling example is the way in which the composer Luigi Cherubini handled the contents of his library at his home in Paris during the 1820s and 30s. He copied in impeccable, luxurious handwriting about 3,000 pages of music by composers of the previous century. The names include Pergolesi, Durante, Padre Martini and Handel, composers whose works were well known and available to purchase in print. These psalms by Benedetto Marcello certainly were, yet Cherubini went to considerable length to copy them from a printed edition and produce four massive, beautifully crafted volumes in his own hand. Copying was, in this case, most likely a means to absorb the models of these past masters to virtually apprentice under them. But still, there seems to have been more at stake than simply going through the music as a composition exercise. In Cherubini's copy, the page layout and calligraphy are monuments of precision. He even went as far as reproducing the original Hebrew and ancient Greek inscriptions of the intonations, though he probably did not understand them. Such precise work must have taken him years to complete. It was an exercise in calligraphy, in perfecting the art of writing by hand as clearly and beautifully as possible, almost as if Cherubini wanted to create by hand something nearing the perfection of print, so that lithographic copies could be easily taken from anything he wrote. Another approach to handling music, which was common in this period, left fascinating traces on items previously owned by Cherubini. He collected a short sample of other composers' musical handwriting. Like many other music devotees of the time, he had an interest in graphology, the study of the shape of a script, in an attempt to gauge traits of the writer's personality. He was believed hand writing conveyed the sensations of physical movement, that of the writer's hand, which were thought to be as revealing as the involuntary gesticulating or facial expressions which accompany a conversation. Cherubini was after one page autograph samples so that he could place them side by side and assess these movements by comparing them. To do so collectors like Cherubini often had to pillage longer manuscripts or letters for samples. This was necessary for that composers who could no longer produce sample pages of their handwriting expressly for the collector. Armed with scissors and spare paper, Cherubini would visit the families of former colleagues and even the library of the Paris conservatoire to carry out such surgical extractions. He would cut out a few autograph pages and substitute them with copies written in his own hand. That librarians and friends indulged him in this way speaks to a different culture of preserving and handling music than we're used to, one in which it was not necessary to keep artifacts, even valuable ones, from being actively engaged with or even modified. Cherubini carried out this kind of surgery on the most cherished manuscript in his own, the autograph of Haydn Symphony number 103, the drum roll, which Haydn himself had donated and dedicated to Cherubini when they met in Vienna. It took out three spare blank pages from the end of the manuscript, copied the content of the beginning of the minuet, and then cut the original out before gluing in his own copy as a replacement. Yet, ripping out three pages of Haydn's handwriting from this manuscript was far from extreme as an example of what music handlers were up to in this period. Another pseudo-science, extremely popular in the early 19th century, phrenology, had similar objectives to graphology, but was based on observing or feeling the shape of the skull, in our case the skulls of musicians, to determine their dispositions. Haydn's head was famously cut off and stolen a few nights after his burial in 1809. It remained separated from the rest of his body for about 150 years, moving from one private collection of skulls to another, until skull and body were finally reunited in a new grave in 1954. To be sure, Cherubini's care in providing replacements for the pages he took from Haydn's autographs and many other manuscripts was tactful by the standards of the time. What's more, preparing his copies of original pages provided further opportunities to engage with various composers through their scripts. Retracing those lines was another way to appreciate their nuances and to get to know the personality behind the music, even if the composer was long dead or lived far away. Cherubini lived at a time when sounds could not be recorded and played back. However, something which could be replayed over and over again was the imaginary encounter with different musical personalities through the shape of their handwriting. Handling music in paper form, just as it is the case when we listen to it, could be the beginning of an extraordinary immersive experience.