Guido of Arezzo

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(b c 991; d after 1033). Music theorist. Educated at the Benedictine Abbey of Pomposa, he later moved to Arezzo where Bishop Theodaldus invited him to train singers for the cathedral. In c 1028 he was called to Rome by Pope John XIX to expound his new methods of notation and teaching, and shortly afterwards entered a monastery (probably at Avellana, near Arezzo). His fame as a pedagogue was legendary. His famous treatise Micrologus is the earliest comprehensive treatise on musical practice that includes a discussion of polyphonic music and plainchant; in it he developed both a system of precise pitch notation relying (like the modern staff) on lines and spaces representing pitches defined by letters (clefs) and a technique of sight-singing based on the syllables ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la and on the so-called ‘Guidonian hand’. Next to Boethius's treatise it was the most copied and read instruction book in the Middle Ages.

Guido d'Arezzo (ca. 995-ca. 1050) was an Italian music theorist and pedagogue who developed the hexachord system and the musical staff.

Guido d'Arezzo was probably born in Italy, although it has been conjectured that he may have come to Italy from France at an early age. He studied at the Benedictine Abbey of Pomposa and then taught singing there. He left the abbey about 1025 because his ideas did not meet with understanding. The bishop of Arezzo invited him to teach music at his cathedral school and became a great admirer of Guido's new pedagogic devices. These were incorporated in Guido's famous textbook, Micrologus, written about 1030.

At Pomposa, Guido had developed a new way of writing Gregorian chant, adopting a four-line staff and clefs. He explained his new methods in the foreword to his antiphonal, a volume of chants that he rewrote in his new way during the 1020s and presented to Pope John XIX, who was greatly impressed. This system of notation is the direct ancestor of all subsequent musical notation.

Educator that he was, Guido developed this idea further in a complete system of ear training and sight singing, which he explained in a letter written from Arezzo to the monk Michael at Pomposa. This system, known as solmization, became the basis of modern solfeggio. For a well-known 8th-century hymn for the feast of St. John the Baptist, Guido created a melody, the first notes of whose first six lines form a scale of two whole tones, a half tone, and two whole tones. This symmetric series of six notes, called a hexachord and sung to the Latin syllables that begin the six lines, ut-re-mi-fa-sol-la, became his central tool for ear training and sight singing. By shifting this hexachord to various pitch levels, the singer could always determine where the crucial half-tone interval must be sung.

Guido or one of his disciples also invented a memory aid for learning the names of all the notes in his musical system, which extends over a range of 20 white keys on the piano:the so-called Guidonian hand. Here the note names of the system were written on the various portions of the left hand and fingers, so that they could be read off by the pupil.

Guido's fame was great, and his ideas had a lasting influence on musical notation, music teaching, and musicianship. In these fields he was one of the most outstanding men in all of Western music.

Further Reading

The best account of Guido d'Arezzo is in Donald J. Grout, A History of Western Music (1960). See also the fuller treatment of him in Gustave Reese, Music in the Middle Ages (1940).

Statue of Guido in Arezzo

Guido of Arezzo or Guido Aretinus or Guido da Arezzo or Guido Monaco or Guido d'Arezzo (991/992 – after 1033) was a music theorist of the Medieval era. He is regarded as the inventor of modern musical notation (staff notation) that replaced neumatic notation; his text, the Micrologus, was the second-most-widely distributed treatise on music in the Middle Ages (after the writings of Boethius).

Gamut as defined by George William Lemon, English Etymology, 1783.

Guido of Arezzo's House

Sheet Music for Ut queant laxis

Guido was a monk of the Benedictine order from the Italian city-state of Arezzo. Recent research has dated his Micrologus to 1025 or 1026; since Guido stated in a letter that he was thirty-four when he wrote it, his birthdate is presumed to be around 991 or 992. His early career was spent at the monastery of Pomposa, on the Adriatic coast near Ferrara. While there, he noted the difficulty that singers had in remembering Gregorian chants. He came up with a method for teaching the singers to learn chants in a short time, and quickly became famous throughout north Italy. However, he attracted the hostility of the other monks at the abbey, prompting him to move to Arezzo, a town which had no abbey, but which did have a large group of cathedral singers, whose training the Bishop Tedald invited him to conduct.

While at Arezzo, he developed new technologies for teaching, such as staff notation and solfeggio, the progenitor of the "do-re-mi" scale, whose syllables are taken from the initial syllables of each of the first six musical phrases of the first stanza of the hymn Ut queant laxis. This may have been based on his earlier work at Pomposa, but the antiphoner that he wrote there is lost. Guido is also credited with the invention of the Guidonian hand,^[1][2] a widely used mnemonic system where note names are mapped to parts of the human hand. The Micrologus, written at the cathedral at Arezzo and dedicated to Tedald, contains Guido's teaching method as it had developed by that time. Soon it had attracted the attention of Pope John XIX, who invited Guido to Rome. Most likely he went there in 1028, but he soon returned to Arezzo, due to his poor health. Nothing is known of him after this time, except that his lost antiphoner was probably completed in 1030.

Guido of Arezzo is also the namesake of GUIDO music notation, a format for computerized representation of musical scores.

See also

• Gamut (music)
• Hexachord

References

1. ^ Claude V. Palisca: "Guido of Arezzo." in Grove Music Online (subscription required)
2. ^ Andrew Hughes and Edith Gerson-Kiwi: "Solmization." in Grove Music Online (subscription required)

• Richard H. Hoppin, Medieval Music. New York, W.W. Norton & Co., 1978. ISBN 0-393-09090-6

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• Guido of Arezzo at The Catholic Encyclopedia.
• Horace's Odes and the Mystery of Do-Re-Mi - an argument that the sol-fa mnemonic was derived from the Ode to Phyllis, by Stuart Lyons. (Also in print ISBN 978 0 85668 790 7)

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