Building a system for writer identification on handwritten music scores

17th and 18th century music scores were copied and distributed in a manual way. Music historians are interested in how the compositions were distributed or in other words, who copied the compositions when and where. Such information may also help to determine the composer when a piece of unknown origin is found. In this paper, we present ongoing work on the development of a software system to analyse such documents automatically and to aid the musicologists in their task to register handwritten music scores. In particular, we focus on the application and adaptation of image processing methods to separate music symbols for the identification task from irrelevant elements.