Sure. It's an old-fashioned term for the artisans who engraved music notation onto metal plates. These were then inked for pressing. It's a highly specialized skill and requires a deep knowledge of now notation works and how musicians will respond to it. Today it is all done on computer but the artistry of knowing how the notation should look and the meaning behind it is still there. That's the basics but the work we do is quite varied and complicated.
It happens that I work for Avid as a designer for Sibelius, the leading music notation program in the world. I also run the Music Engraving Tips Facebook group if you're interested in learning more.
That's very much it. You could also make an analogy to the arts of typography and typesetting.
It's of the same importance to a composer or musician that the notation is legible and beautiful, as it is to a graphic designer or reader that type and layout are legible and beautiful.
If the GP is interested in the topic, there are great videos by Tantacrul on his experience redesigning the notation font for MuseScore [0] and his overview of MuseScore 4.0's engraving improvements [1] - in particular this second video, concerning mainly layout, shows just how far this CSS approach would have to go to have a truly legible, reflowable layout in the face of beams/slurs/ties.
(I don't want to take away from anyone on the Sibelius team, they're likely even better experts on the subject than Tantacrul is, but as far as I know, they didn't make long-form Youtube videos about the topic! He also likely got the job of leading the MuseScore redesign thanks to his previous videos that critiqued and reimagined the interfaces of music composition software... including older versions of Sibelius [2] and MuseScore [3])
I know absolutely nothing about notation software, but I remember watching that MuseScore rewrite video (link [1] above) a few months ago and was absolutely enthralled. Definitely recommend watching Tantacrul's videos to anyone who wants to learn more.
As a player (jazz bassist) I'm amazed by the subtlety of making notation work. Oddly enough, most of my band's material is still not in computer readable form. A lot of it was hand copied.
It happens that I work for Avid as a designer for Sibelius, the leading music notation program in the world. I also run the Music Engraving Tips Facebook group if you're interested in learning more.