A music manuscript is a document hand-written in musical notation, usually on paper or parchment, of a musical composition or a part thereof. Music manuscripts were traditionally created by composers for submission to music publishers to be engraved and printed. In recent decades, although many or most composers input their new compositions directly into computers, some of them still produce manuscripts first, particularly when an idea occurs to them and no computer is immediately available.
Manuscripts are today usually written on manuscript paper, which is paper that is obtained with the staff lines already printed on it. This eliminates the need for each composer or assistant to laboriously draw their own staves onto blank paper.
The earliest extant Western European music manuscripts are a few late ninth century liturgical texts that use small symbols above the words to indicate the shapes of the melodic lines. A large number of manuscripts from the common practice period (approximately 1650 to 1900) still exist, and many of these are extremely valuable.