Guido d'Arezzo

Italian musician

• Born: c. 991
• Birthplace: Possibly Arezzo, Tuscany (now in Italy)
• Died: 1050
• Place of death: Avellana (now in Italy)

Guido is generally credited with reestablishing solmization and with perfecting staff notation. His Micrologus, a treatise on musical practice, was one of the most widely copied and read books on music in the Middle Ages.

Early Life

Guido d’Arezzo (GWEE-doh duh-REHT-soh) was probably born in Arezzo, although at least one source assigns Paris as his birthplace. Nothing is known about his early life and parentage. Music historians have managed, however, to piece together an approximate outline of his career from allusions and references in two letters written by Guido one to Bishop Theobald of Arezzo, Guido’s patron and mentor, and the other to Brother Michael of Pomposa, possibly the co-author of one of Guido’s early musical texts.

Guido was educated at the Benedictine abbey at Pomposa, close to Ferrara on the Adriatic coast. It was probably at this abbey that he began studying music theory and developing his ideas of staff notation; certainly, while he was there he gained acclaim for his ability to train singers to learn new chants in a short time and with a minimum of effort. With his fellow brother Michael, Guido drafted an antiphonary a collection of liturgical chants notated according to Guido’s new system. Although the antiphonary is now lost, it attracted much favorable attention in monasteries throughout Italy as well as resentment and scorn from Guido’s fellow monks at Pomposa, who were wary of any departures from tradition and therefore scorned Guido’s innovation .

At some point during his early training, Guido may have spent some time at the monastery of Saint-Maur-des-Fossés near Paris his familiarity with the music treatise of Odo of Saint-Maur-des-Fossés is evident in his ideas on staff notation, which may have been refined at the French monastery. In his letter to Brother Michael, Guido advocates close study of a work entitled Enchiridion, which he attributes to Odo and from which he claims to have learned many of the musical principles underlying his notation system.

Life’s Work

Around 1025, Guido moved to Arezzo at the invitation of Bishop Theobald, who appointed him to a teaching post at the cathedral school. Bishop Theobald later commissioned the Micrologus de disciplina artis musicae (after 1026; best known as Micrologus), which was dedicated to him at its completion. Guido remained under the protection of Bishop Theobald until at least 1036. As a music teacher, he trained singers for the cathedral services, presumably by using the new notation described in the antiphonary.

The Micrologus one of the most influential books of its time was designed for singers, with the object of improving their skill in using the new notation and in sightsinging both familiar and unfamiliar chants. Although much of the work is highly theoretical in both language and content, two chapters are of interest to lay musicians. In one, Guido compares the elements of a melody to the elements in a stanza of poetry: Individual melodic sounds correspond to letters of the alphabet, groups of sounds correspond to syllables, and groups of syllables become analogous to poetic feet. The other chapter, on organum an early form of polyphony, or music with two or more independent voices marks an important development in the history of counterpoint. Although common practice decreed two voices moving in parallel fourths and fifths, Guido introduced the idea of independent voices that could occasionally move apart or even cross, although the intervals between voices were restricted to consonances (sounds that were restful rather than discordant). As a comprehensive document on music theory and practice, the Micrologus was used extensively in both monasteries and universities during the Middle Ages and survives today in about seventy manuscripts dating from the eleventh to the fifteenth century.

Sometime around 1028, Guido traveled to Rome in the company of Dom Peter of Arezzo and Abbot Grunwald, possibly of Badicroce, to the south of Arezzo. The journey was undertaken at the request of Pope John XIX, who may have seen or heard of Guido and Brother Michael’s antiphonary and the new system of notation and who wished to have Guido explain his pedagogical system. Before he could accomplish that task, Guido had to leave Rome as a result of ill health, although he did promise to return and resume his explanation of the new notation to the clergy. On the trip home, Guido paused for a visit with the abbot at Pomposa, who, having heard of Guido’s visit to Rome, counseled Guido to avoid cities and to settle in a monastery, preferably Pomposa. Guido declined that invitation and about a year later joined the Camaldolese monastery in Avellana, where he eventually became prior.

Not long after his visit to Rome, Guido wrote the Epistola de ignoto cantu (c. 1028), a letter to Brother Michael in which he gave a full description of his theory of solmization, or the method of singing any liturgical melody through the use of the Aretinian scale, involving the six syllables ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la which today correspond to the first six tones of the major scale. Although Guido is often credited with inventing solmization, that technique was in fact known to the ancient Greeks; his contribution to music was to establish the practical application of solmization in singing technique. Guido derived the six syllables from a hymn to Saint John Ut queant laxis in which the six different phrases of the melody begin on six different notes in the ascending order of today’s major scale. As with so many of Guido’s contributions to music theory, a bit of scholarly controversy surrounds the origin of the hymn. Early historians credited Guido with its authorship, although later scholars identified the text in a manuscript dated around 800. The melody may be Guido’; in fact, he may have composed it as a pedagogical device to use in teaching sightsinging, a valuable skill for clergy and laymen charged with singing during church services. In the letter, Guido informed Brother Michael that the new system had enabled his choirboys to learn new chants rapidly; weeks of training, he wrote, had given way to singing chants on sight.

Two other pieces of writing by Guido are mentioned in some detail in medieval manuscripts. Written after 1030, both were apparently intended as introductory pieces for the lost antiphonary. The Aliae regulae (c. 1020-1025), intended as a guide to using the antiphonary, laments the time spent by young singers in learning liturgical chants and committing them to memory and outlines the advantages of a system of line notation involving four lines and three spaces based on height of pitch. In this essay, Guido proposes that the lines and spaces composing the system be named after the letters of the pitches they represent. Although he does not specify the number of lines to be thus identified, he does point out that he uses a yellow line for C and a red line for F, with a black line above C and another between C and F. Some manuscripts show a green line for B-flat, with other lines drawn in when necessary, although music historians believe these features to be additions by others and not Guido. The neumes (modern-day musical notes) rest on the lines and in the spaces. Although a number of eleventh and twelfth century manuscripts display the new notation with Guido’s colors, thirteenth century manuscripts show that the colored lines were eventually deemed unnecessary. The letter identifications survive today in the C, F, and G clefs. Guido did not invent alphabetical notation; the French were already using an alphabetical system involving the letters from A to P in the late 990’. As with solmization, Guido perfected an awkward system already in use. Guido’s system of letter notation uses only the letters A to G in series of capital letters, small letters, and double small letters. The Regulae rhythmicae in antiphonarii sui prologum prolate (c. 1025-1027; Guido D’Arezzo’s “Regule rithmice,” “Prologue in antiphonarium,” and “Epistola ad michahelem,” 1999), also a prologue and written in verse, contains short explanations of several musical concepts such as intervals and modes and the gamut, or range, of notes available to the singer described in the Micrologus. In addition, Guido expounds further his ideas of a system of notation using colored and lettered lines.

Sigibertus Gemblacensis, a twelfth century theorist, credits Guido with the invention of a pedagogical device called the Guidonian Hand, also known as a hexachord. This device involved labeling each of the nineteen phalanges of the open left hand with nineteen of the notes in the gamut, with the twentieth note in the air above the tip of the middle finger. The Guidonian Hand functioned as an aid in teaching solmization by providing the singer with a visible aid to memorizing intervals. Popular during the Middle Ages, the Guidonian Hand was widely used by singers in learning Gregorian chants. Modern music historians have discounted the notion that Guido invented the Guidonian Hand (although it was named for him); the basic idea of the hand appears in manuscripts dating before Guido’s lifetime. More than likely, he popularized and refined an older technique that had been largely ignored by lay musicians and music teachers.

Significance

Although Guido’s enthusiastic admirers through the centuries have credited him with various musical inventions, it seems clear that he was a popularizer rather than an inventor. He himself acknowledged, in the letter to Brother Michael, that he was merely simplifying ideas already in circulation among innovative musicians. Nevertheless, Guido’s significant contributions to music are many: He was a renowned teacher in an age when music pedagogy was just becoming a discipline; he saw the practical applications of theoretical concepts and devised ways to teach those applications to singers; and he disseminated his ideas to the world through his writing.

The extent of Guido’s influence as a musicologist and teacher is evident in the number of commentaries on his work from the eleventh century to the Renaissance. Written by other music theorists many of them anonymous from Italy, England, and Belgium, these commentaries demonstrate the impact of Guido’s innovations and reforms on the development of polyphonic liturgical music and on the pedagogical methods used in training singers in monasteries and the great cathedral schools of the Middle Ages. Guido’s ideas were disseminated through these commentaries and through copies of his works, which were distributed widely. As late as the sixteenth century, an elaborately illustrated compilation consisting mainly of Guido’s Regulae rhythmicae in antiphonarii prologum prolate and the Epistola de ignoto cantu was circulated as Guido’s Introductorium.

Bibliography

Brockett, Clyde Waring, Jr. “A Comparison of the Five Monochords of Guido of Arezzo.” Current Musicology 32 (1981): 29-42. A discussion of the five versions of the monochord (a single-string pitch finder and interval-measuring device) described in the musical treatises of Guido d’Arezzo. The author uses the descriptions as a point of departure for a comparison of the ideas elaborated in Guido’s writings.

Burtius, Nicolaus. Musices Opusculum. Translated by Clement A. Miller. Neuhausen-Stuttgart: Hänssler-Verlag, 1983. A translation of a fifteenth century work on music theory that discusses Guido. Bibliography and index.

Crocker, Richard, and David Hiley, eds. The Early Middle Ages to 1300. 2d ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. Part of the New Oxford History of Music series, this work presents a history and criticism of music in the early Middle Ages. Bibliography and index.

Flynn, William T. Medieval Music as Medieval Exegesis. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 1999. This examination of liturgical music in the Middle Ages includes a discussion of the teaching of singing. Bibliography and index.

Pesce, Dolores. Guido d’Arezzo’s “Regule rithmice,” “Prologus in antiphonarium,” and “Epistola ad michahelem”: A Critical Text and Translation with an Introduction, Annotations, Indices, and New Manuscript Inventories. Ottawa, Canada: Institute of Mediaeval Music, 1999. A translation of some of the writings on music theory by Guido. Bibliography and indexes.