Music Type Foundry fonts newly revised and re-released

Five of the Music Type Foundry fonts have been newly revised and re-released exclusively on our Notation Central marketplace. This marks the first time in three years that the Music Type Foundry (MTF) fonts have been made available to new customers.

Each of the newly available fonts, originally designed by Abraham Lee, has been updated and revised by Dan Kreider, and are now only available in the SMuFL format, for use in Dorico and any other notation application that supports the SMuFL standard. They will not work in Sibelius or other programs that do not support SMuFL.

Further, each MTF music font now comes bundled with a complementary text font and an accompanying font metadata file containing the recommended engraving settings for crucial elements that are not stored within the font file itself.

Finally, each MTF purchase contains all of these items in easy-to-use installers for Mac and Windows, so that they can be used immediately after purchasing and downloading them.

The sale

To celebrate this occasion, we are offering each MTF font at Notation Central at a special introductory price of $59.99, a 25% discount off of the regular price of $79.99 each. This sale runs through March 31, 2025 April 7, 2025 and no code is needed.

In addition, there will be an ongoing discount of 25% off where customers can create an ad-hoc bundle by purchasing two or more MTF fonts at once and applying the code MTF25 at checkout. This discount can be stacked with the introductory sale, making it possible to obtain each MTF font through March 31 April 7 for the effective price of only $45 each.

The fonts

The five fonts re-released today are:

MTF Arnold

MTF-Arnold is a gorgeous music typeface that resembles many 20th century Universal Edition (UE) scores. Its clear, robust noteheads are balanced by a warmth that suits music of the era as well as more contemporary scores that seek a timeless feel.

MTF-Arnold is bundled with the Nepomuk text font, by Florian Kretlow and Ben Byram-Wigfield. Nepomuk is inspired by the type commonly found in music plate engraving from the late 19th to the mid 20th-century.

MTF Beethoven

MTF-Beethoven is a classic music font designed to resemble the look of scores engraved by G. Henle Verlag in the 1950s. Its instant familiarity and appropriateness for the standard repertoire belies a subtle modernist influence, reflective of the era in which the style was refined.

MTF-Beethoven is bundled with the Libre Bodoni text font. The Libre Bodoni fonts are based on Morris Fuller Benton’s Bodoni typeface, from his legendary America Type Founders foundry, which in turn was a revival of the late 18th and early 19th century type designs of Italian type designer Giambattista Bodoni. They are often seen in scores published by Henle.

MTF-Cadence

MTF-Cadence was designed to bring back some of the subtleties of hand-engraved scores. It is carefully crafted to make the music “get out of the way” so the musician can focus on performing the music rather than getting distracted by what they see on the page. Thus, this typeface is designed to be used on all kinds of scores, from simple lessons and worksheets to the finest piano concertos and orchestral symphonies.

MTF-Cadence is bundled with the Source Serif 4 text font, a serif typeface in the transitional style, loosely based upon the work of Pierre-Simon Fournier, a French mid-18th century type designer. The letter shapes are simplified and highly readable. Its historical roots, combined with contemporary guidance, give the typeface a strong character of its own.

MTF-Haydn

MTF-Haydn is a classic music typeface inspired by the look of an Edition Peters score. This jewel in the foundry immediately evokes the feel of scores from the golden years of hand-engraving.

MTF-Haydn is bundled with the Old Standard text font, which reproduces a specific type of modern classicist style of serif typefaces, very commonly used in various editions of the late 19th and early 20th century. Its specific features are closely associated with older books, especially those in the social and humanitarian fields. It shares a letter structure with Century Schoolbook, albeit being crisper with finer hairlines and serifs, especially in italic, making it ideal for many uses.

MTF-Scorlatti

MTF-Scorlatti is a revival of the music symbols used by the famous SCORE notation program, created by the venerable Leland Smith. When Smith invented SCORE in the 1980s, his typography system set the bar for aesthetics. Scorlatti tries to maintain the beauty of Smith’s original design while modernizing the segmented outlines with continuous, elegant Bezier curves.

MTF-Scorlatti is bundled with the Inria Serif text font. Inria Serif was designed for the official communications of Inria, a French national research institution focusing on computer science and applied mathematics. The Institute needed a font showing its values at the crossroad of humanity, technology, excellence and creativity. Its selection honors Smith’s pioneering role as computer programmer who made lasting contributions to music’s digital age.

The story

Abraham Lee started designing fonts in the mid-2010s with a consummate eye and a flair for recreating the most prized designs. His inspirations were real engravings from what he called the “golden era of music publishing”: legendary designs from Bärenreiter, Henle, and Edition Peters. Abraham’s passion didn’t stop, though, with the work of the plate engravers; he recognized that fine music setting could also be the purview of music resources and even wholly digital sources, like the beautiful work of pioneers such as Leland Smith, the creator of SCORE.

Drawing upon these sources, Abraham set to work creating some of the most elegant music typefaces of the modern era, initially supporting only Lilypond and Finale software. His work culminated in 2016 when offered his fonts from his new Music Type Foundry. In addition to updating all of his fonts and prefixing them with “MTF” to denote the quality of the commercial fonts, he also crucially began supporting the SMuFL standard in some of his fonts. This made MTF one of the earliest purveyors of Dorico-compatible third-party fonts, allowing users of that software an alternative to the small number of fonts that shipped with the software.

In time, Abraham moved on to non-musical pursuits full time, and, rather than let his creations wither on the vine, without support, he made the difficult but respectable decision to shut down Music Type Foundry and to stop offering his fonts for sale in early 2022.

Fortunately, this decision didn’t preclude the possibility of finding a way to revive the MTF catalog in the future. Partnering with Notation Central as exclusive publisher and distributor, Abraham handed his fonts to music engraver Dan Kreider, who in the intervening years has gained tremendous acclaim in the notation community and beyond for his specialty fonts such as MusGlyphs, MusAnalysis, MusFrets, and Cantorum.

Dan has gone through each glyph of the SMuFL-compatible MTF fonts, standardizing the set of glyphs, along with fully updating the accompanying metadata file required for each font, ensuring a consistent experience when switching among them in Dorico or any SMuFL-supported music notation software, assisted invaluably by Ben Byram-Wigfield. The fonts also come in Windows and Mac installers for the first time, simplifying their installation for the less-technically savvy user.

The result is a release of new versions of these premium fonts, making them available for the first time in three years.