Rastrum – The 5 pointed metal nib pen for writing music

God may or may not have invented music, but His followers certainly had a hand in standardizing it. Like the history of the written word and mass education, the history of written music is closely related to religion. Modern music notation was invented in the church to help standardize hymns and prayer music. Various methods of recording musical notes have existed since the beginning of civilisation, but the idea of using a 5-line staff for music notation goes back to an Italian Benedictine monk from a thousand years ago.

We can assume the scribes of those times used quills, reed styluses and all manner of tools to draw out the staffs and musical notes. Maybe they even had their own labor-saving devices which have been lost to time. But it took the invention of the metal-nibbed dip pen to lead to one of the most bizarre and beautiful writing instruments there ever was, the Rastrum.

‘Rastrum’ comes from the word for a rake in Latin, because this five-pointed writing instrument looks exactly like the gardening tool in question. The five-headed nib was used to easily draw the five lines of the standard music staff for sheet music. A pen to quickly make your own lined paper, which makes it stationery designed to make stationery. Perfect. 

Over the centuries many variations were invented, rollers with ink pads, stencils, and even multi-tipped ball pens now exist as a homage to the old rastrum, but there’s something romantic about the old dip pen version. You can imagine the classic European composers absent mindedly lining their sheets so they can quickly scribble a musical idea before it’s lost.

Speaking of classical composers, Beethoven’s notebooks are an invaluable artifact because he wrote these musical notebooks throughout his working life. Several dozens of them were sold off after his death as mementos of a celebrity, which he was even in his time. These now priceless artifacts changed hands over time and were even torn apart, with single pages given away as gifts. Musicologists have tried to piece them together over the past few centuries but how do you put together loose pages of notebooks from a lifetime of work?

That’s where Rastrology comes in. It’s the study of the lines and marks made by the rastrum. In the wear and tear of the nibs and the mark quality, musicologists have found subtle clues that have helped add an age and chronology to hundreds of pages of sheet music. There’s a certain poetic melody to that idea. Not only did the musician leave their signature on all that old music, but so did the humble pen they recorded it with.

1. From music to games, here are some simple casual games and puzzles related to the world of art supplies and tools for you to test your stationery chops. – https://inkymemo.com/games/
2. Explore this small selection of Indian stationery makers who are making a unique expression of the tools and handmade stationery themselves. – https://inkymemo.com/handmade-stationery-makers-india/