AbstractThis paper describes a language which has been devised to facilitate the inclusion of printed music in the output of a typesetting system. The music program acts as a preprocessor to troff, which is the typesetting program associated with the UNIX system. The design of the music input language has concentrated on the simplicity of the process of transcribing and typing in data from a standard music score, yet still allowing some of the complex requirements of serious music scores to be handled.