lectura 4 guido of arezzo

Guido of Arezzo [Aretinus](b c991–2; d after 1033). Music theorist. His fame as a pedagogue waslegendary in the Middle Ages and he is remembered today for hisdevelopment of a system of precise pitch notation through lines and spacesand for propagating a method of sight-singing which relied upon thesyllables ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la. His Micrologus is the earliest comprehensivetreatise on musical practice that includes a discussion of both polyphonicmusic and plainchant. It was used throughout the Middle Ages inmonasteries, and from the 13th century also in the universities. Next to thetreatise of Boethius it was the most copied and read instruction book onmusic in the Middle Ages; its text is preserved in at least 70 manuscriptsfrom the 11th century to the 15th.1. Life.2. Writings.WRITINGSBIBLIOGRAPHY

CLAUDE V. PALISCAGuido of Arezzo1. Life.The main events of Guido's career can be reconstructed from his letterdedicating the Micrologus to Bishop Theodaldus, and from his letter to hisfriend, Brother Michael of Pomposa. These two documents, however, lackdates. The date of Guido's birth can be narrowed down to the period 990–99through the explicit of a manuscript of the Micrologus, now lost, but whichstated that its composition was finished at the age of 34 in the papacy ofJohn XIX (who reigned between 1024 and 1033). Smits van Waesberghe'sconclusion that the work dates from around 1028–32 would put his birthdatebetween 994 and 998. Hans Oesch's dating of the Micrologus at 1025–6, onthe other hand, would place the birthdate around 991.Guido was educated in the Benedictine abbey of Pomposa on the Adriaticcoast near Ferrara. While at Pomposa he built up a reputation for trainingsingers to learn new chants in a short time. He and a fellow brother, Michael,drafted an antiphoner, now lost, which was notated according to a newsystem. These innovations attracted attention from other parts of Italy,whereas at Pomposa they drew the envy and scorn of their Benedictinebrothers.Around 1025 Guido moved to Arezzo, where there was no monastery. Hecame under the protection of Theodaldus, Bishop of Arezzo between 1023and 1036. The bishop assigned him the task of training singers for the city'scathedral. The Micrologus was dedicated to and commissioned by him(fig.1). Probably not long after its completion Guido was called to Rome byPope John XIX, who had seen or heard of the antiphoner and its uniquenotation as well as of Guido's novel teaching methods. He was accompaniedon this visit, which took place probably around 1028, by Dom Peter ofArezzo, Prefect of the Canons, and Abbot Grunwald of Arezzo (Abbot

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perhaps of Badicroce, 15 km to the south).Because of ill-health and the damp heat of summer Guido left Rome with apromise to return in winter to explain further his antiphoner and its notationto the pope and the clergy. He then paid a visit to Abbot Guido of Pomposa,who counselled him to avoid the cities, where almost all the bishops wereaccused of simony, and settle in a monastery, inviting him to return toPomposa. However Guido apparently chose a monastery near Arezzo,probably that of Avellana of the Camaldolese order. Several Camaldolesemanuscripts are the oldest exhibiting the Guidonian notation.Guido of Arezzo2. Writings.(i) Chronology.The chronology of Guido's writings is uncertain. The Prologus and Regulaerhythmicae were both intended as guides to the use of the antiphoner whichcontained the new notation. Guido apparently drafted it together with hisfriend Michael in Pomposa, for in the Epistola to Michael he spoke of‘nostrum antiphonarium’ (‘our antiphoner’). Both the Prologus and Regulaerhythmicae describe the new notation, of which, on the other hand, there isno trace in the Micrologus. The Epistola, written immediately after the trip toRome, mentions all of these previous works. The date of the trip to Rome,which must have taken place before Pope John XIX's death in 1033, is thusthe key to dating all Guido's works. The Micrologus must have been writtenafter 1026, because in the letter dedicating it to Bishop Theodaldus, Guidopraised him for having ‘created by an exceedingly marvellous plan thechurch of St Donatus’, which was commissioned from the architectAdabertus Maginardo in 1026 and completed in 1032. The antiphoner wasat least started in Pomposa but it and its prose and verse prologues wereprobably not finished until 1030.(ii) Prologus in antiphonarium.In this prologue to his antiphoner Guido lamented the time young singersspent learning chants by heart and pointed out the advantages of a systemof lines identified as to height of pitch, permitting the sight-singing ofunknown chants. ‘So that you may better detect these levels [of pitch], linesare drawn close together, and certain levels of notes become these samelines, while certain others fall between the lines, in the intermediate distanceor space between the lines’ (GerbertS, ii, 35b). Further, he proposed that‘whichever lines or spaces you wish are preceded by certain letters of themonochord [e.g. A to g] and also colours are marked over them’. How manylines are to be drawn and identified or coloured Guido left unspecified. Hehimself, he said, used two colours: yellow for C, red for F. The reason forcalling attention to these two steps of the gamut is that below C and F fallthe semitones, the location of which had always presented a problem inreading diastematic neumatic notation. Thus the singer is liberated fromhaving to use a tonary – a repertory of chants arranged by mode – to locatethe starting tones and finals.Both the key-letters and coloured lines, separately or in combination, are to


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be found in manuscripts from central Italy from the 11th and 12th centuries,showing the influence of Guido's antiphoner, which is itself lost. Thecoloured lines disappeared in the 13th century, while the key-letters surviveto the present day in the guise of F, C and G clefs.(iii) Micrologus.This work is addressed to singers, and its object is to improve their skill inusing the new notation and in singing both familiar and unfamiliar chants atsight. Guido encouraged the use of the monochord for learning the precisedistance of intervals. He recognized a gamut of 21 steps, as shown in ex.1,including two forms of b in the upper two octaves, which extends upwards bythe 5th the gamut set forth in the Dialogus (usually attributed to Abbot Odobut probably – according to Huglo – written by an anonymous Lombard).Guido derived the intonation of this gamut by both a conventional division ofthe monochord and a new one which reduced the number of measurementsto five, a method adopted as the mensura Guidonis by a number of Guido'ssuccessors, notably Johannes Cotto.

Guido preferred the designations ‘modes’ or ‘tropes’ to ‘tones’, and the terms‘protus’, ‘deuterus’, ‘tritus’ and ‘tetrardus’ to the numbering from one to eight,although his four modes divide into eight through the authentic–plagaldistinction. The chief determinant of modality for Guido was the final note ofa chant and the relationship of all previous notes to it, particularly the initialnote and the endings and beginnings of a chant's distinctiones or phrases.He spoke in some detail about the allowable descent and ascent from thefinal, and wondered at the diversity of appeal of the modes, ‘one personbeing attracted to the lame hops of the authentic deuterus, another to thejoyfulness of the plagal of the tritus, one by the volubility of the authentictetrardus, and another by the sweetness of the plagal of the tetrardus’(chap.xiv).One of the most original chapters in the Micrologus is that on thecomposition of melodic lines (chap.xv). Here Guido compared the parts of amelody to those of verse, the individual sounds being analogous to letters,and groups of them to syllables, while groups of syllables make up a neume,parallel to a ‘part’ or foot in poetry; several neumes make up a ‘distinction’,which, like the end of a line, is a suitable place to breathe. The end of eachpart of a melody is marked by a held note or pause, shorter or longerdepending on the structural level of the part, being shortest for the ‘syllable’,longest for the ‘distinction’. It is in this connection that Guido made asuggestion that has given rise to controversy, when he said that ‘it is good tobeat time to a song as though by metrical feet’.Guido advocated arranging neumes in a composition so that their lengthsare equal or in simple ratios to each other, varying the number of units asthe poet juxtaposes different feet in a verse. Lengths of phrases or‘distinctions’ should also bear such relationships to each other. Like theboundless multitude of words created out of a few syllables, all chant ismade by joining only six intervals either in upward or downward sequence,


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that is arsis or thesis, with the intermixture of single and repeated notes.How these various kinds of motion are combined forms the subject ofGuido's theory of motus, and their permutations are demonstrated in adiagram that challenged the ingenuity of medieval illustrators (fig.2). Theseconsiderations led Guido to suggest a mechanical method of melodicinvention or improvisation (chap.xvii) through lining up with the rising stepsof the gamut the vowels a e i o u as shown in ex.2.

Guido's chapter on diaphony or organum (chap.xviii) is one of the mostimportant documents for the history of counterpoint. He regarded the parallelorganum in 5ths and octaves described in Musica enchiriadis as rough,admiring the ‘softer’ effect achieved by suppressing the semitone anddiapente as simultaneous sonorities and preferring the diatessaron, ditone,tone and semiditone, in that order. To avoid the tritone in organizing byparallel 4ths Guido devised a set of rules for oblique motion, while forachieving cadence he adopted a method of converging towards the unisonor occursus through the 3rd or 2nd.(iv) Regulae rhythmicae.The full title in some manuscripts of the didactic poem, Regulae rhythmicaein antiphonarii prologum prolatae, suggests that it was a poetic form of theprologue to his antiphoner. At the same time it expounds briefly some of thedoctrine in Micrologus: that is, the gamut, the intervals, the modes and theirfinals, with the addition of a subject missing in the treatise, namely adescription of the notation by coloured and lettered lines.(v) Epistola de ignoto cantu.It was only in the letter to his friend Brother Michael that Guido took up themethod of teaching the reading of new melodies by means of the syllablesut, re, mi, fa, sol, la, derived from a hymn to St John (see Theory, theorists,fig.2). Although the text of the hymn Ut queant laxis is found in a manuscriptof c800 (I-Rvat Ottob.532) and by an old tradition is ascribed to PaulusDiaconus, the melody in question was unknown before Guido's time andnever had any liturgical function. It is probable that Guido invented themelody as a mnemonic device or reworked an existing melody now lost. Thefunction of the hymn melody was to supply easily remembered phrases ofmelody or ‘neumes’ (as he referred to them) for each step of the central partof the gamut, namely the notes CDEFGa. Guido introduced the hymn in theEpistola with these words: ‘If you wish to learn some note or neume … youmust observe the same note or neume at the head of some very well-knownmelody, and for every note you wish to learn have at hand such a melodythat begins by the same note, as this melody does that I use in teachingboys …’ (GerbertS, ii, 45a; ex.3). He then explained that in this melody sixdifferent notes begin the six different phrases of the melody, so that eachphrase can serve as an aid to a singer wishing to read a particular neume.The Ut queant laxis melody could be used in two ways: by a singer hearing


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an unwritten melody and wishing to notate it, when he would match theorder of tones and semitones in the appropriate phrase of Ut queant to theunwritten phrase; or in learning an unknown written melody, in which casehe must match the notated neumes to the familiar phrases of the Ut queantand thereby derive the sound of the unknown neumes. ‘Hearing someunwritten neume, consider which phrase [of the hymn] most agrees with theend of the neume, so that the last note of the neume and the first of thephrase [of the hymn] are unisons …. On the other hand, if you wish to beginto sing some written melody, you must be very careful that you end eachneume properly so that its end fits the beginning of the phrase [of the hymn]whose first note begins on the note with which the [unknown] neume ends’.

Whether Guido went beyond this application of the hymn's stepwise risingseries of melodic incipits to devise a method of solmization cannot beestablished from known documents. However, among the manuscriptscontaining the Epistola five of the oldest, dating from the 11th century to the12th, present a second text set to the hymn: ‘Tri-num et unum Pro nobismiseris De-um precemur Nos puris mentibus Te obsecramus Ad precesintende Do mine nostras’. In one of these manuscripts (F-Pn lat.7211, 12thcentury) the scribe added a simpler melody to these syllables and finallysuperscribed over the pitch letters of ex.1 the syllables of the Tri seriesstarting on Γ, C, F, G, c, f and g. Johannes Cotto (c1100) observed that theItalians used other syllables than the ut series, and this was stillremembered by Ramis de Pareia, who cited in Musica practica (1482),chap.vii, the syllables tri pro de nos te ad do. To have initiated a method ofsolmization with one or the other set of syllables would have been quiteconsistent with Guido's constant search for effective devices to train the eyeand ear. Similarly, the so-called Guidonian hand may have been adopted byhim as an aid to training singers (see ..\Frames/F006218.htmlSolmization,figs.1 and 2). Although the hand occurs in pre-Guidonian manuscripts as amethod of finding the semitones of tetrachords, it does not take itswell-known form showing the solmization syllables until the 12th century.Sigebertus Gemblacensis (c1105–10) in his Chronica (PL, clx, 204)nevertheless credited Guido with assigning ‘six letters or syllables to sixnotes … and he set them out on the joints of the fingers of the left handthroughout the diapason so that their upward and downward ascents anddescents would impress themselves on the eyes and ears’.(vi) Commentaries.Guido's writings, particularly the Micrologus, became the subject ofnumerous commentaries beginning in the 11th century. Apart from those in


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the treatises of Aribo and Johannes Cotto, the most important of these areanonymous: Liber argumentorum and Liber specierum, both probably ofItalian origin, from between 1050 and 1100; Metrologus, probably of Englishorigin from the 13th century; and the so-called Commentarius anonymus inMicrologum, edited by C. Vivell in 1917, which Smits van Waesberghe hasshown to have been written in Liège either by a native author or one ofBavarian origin between c1070 and 1100. A compilation usually illustratedwith elaborate charts of the hexachord system and consisting essentially ofthe poem Regulae rhythmicae, the prologue to the antiphoner, and theEpistola passed in the 16th century as the Introductorium of Guido.

See also Musica enchiriadis; Notation; Organum; Solmization.

Guido of Arezzo

WRITINGS[Prologus in antiphonarium], ed. J. Smits van Waesberghe: Tres tractatuli

Guidonis Aretini, Divitiae musicae artis, ser.A, iii (Buren, 1975); ed. andtrans. Pesce (1999); also ed. as Aliae regulae, GerbertS, ii, 34-7; Eng.trans. in StrunkSR

Micrologus (near or in Arezzo c1026 but not before 1026 or after 1032),GerbertS, ii, 2; ed. J. Smits van Waesberghe, CSM, iv (1955); Eng.trans. in Hucbald, Guido, and John on Music: Three Medieval Treatises,ed. C.V. Palisca (New Haven, CT, 1978); Ger. trans., ed. M.Hermesdorff (Trier, 1876)

[Regulae rhythmicae], ed. J. Smits van Waesberghe: Guidonis Aretini‘Regulae rhythmicae’ (Buren, 1985); ed. and trans. Pesce (1999); alsoed. in GerbertS, ii, 25–33

[Epistola ad Michaelem], ed. and trans. Pesce (1999); also ed. as Epistolade ignoto cantu, GerbertS, ii, 43–50; partial Eng. trans. in StrunkSR;Ger. trans., ed. M. Hermesdorff (Trier, 1884)

Guido of ArezzoBIBLIOGRAPHYJ. Smits van Waesberghe: ‘The Musical Notation of Guido of Arezzo’, MD,

v (1951), 15–53J. Smits van Waesberghe: ‘Guido of Arezzo and Musical Improvisation’,

MD, v (1951), 55–63J. Smits van Waesberghe: De musico-paedagogico et theoretico Guidone

Aretino (Florence, 1953)J. Smits van Waesberghe: ‘Guido von Arezzo als Musikerzieher und

Musiktheoretiker’, GfMkB: Bamberg 1953, 44-7H. Oesch: Guido von Arezzo (Berne, 1954) [contains useful bibliography]J. Smits van Waesberghe, ed.: Expositiones in Micrologum Guidonis

Aretini (Amsterdam, 1957)C.-A. Moberg: ‘Die Musik in Guido von Arezzos Solmisationshymne’, AMw,

xvi (1959), 187–206M. Huglo: ‘L'auteur du “Dialogue sur la musique” attribué à Odon’, RdM, lv


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(1969), 119–71J. Smits van Waesberghe: ‘Wie Wortwahl und Terminologie bei Guido von

Arezzo entstanden und überliefert wurden’, AMw, xxxi (1974), 73–86E.L. Waeltner and M. Bernhard: Wortindex zu den echten Schriften Guidos

von Arezzo (Munich, 1976)C.V. Palisca: introductions to Guido: Micrologus, and John: On Music,

Hucbald, Guido, and John on Music (New Haven, CT, 1978), 49–56,87–100; latter repr. in Beyond the Moon: Festschrift Luther Dittmer, ed.B. Gillingham and P. Merkley (Ottawa, 1990), 144–62

K. Berger: ‘ The Hand and the Art of Memory’, MD, xxxv (1981), 87–119S. Fuller: ‘ Theoretical Foundations of Early Organum Theory’, AcM, liii

(1981), 52–84T. Russel: ‘ A Poetic Key to a Pre-Guidonian Palm and the Echemata’,

JAMS, xxxiv (1981), 109–118J. Chailley: ‘ Ut queant laxis et les origines de la gamme’, AcM, lvi (1984),

48–69M. Huglo: ‘Bibliographie des éditions et études relatives à la théorie

musicale du Moyen Age 1972–1987’, AcM, lx (1988), 229–72K.-J. Sachs: ‘ Tradition und Innovation bei Guido von Arezzo’, Kontinuität

und Transformation der Antike im Mittelalter: Freiburg 1987, ed. W.Erzgräber (Sigmaringen, 1989), 233–44

F. Reckow: ‘Guido's Theory of Organum after Guido: Transmission,Adaptation, Transformation’, Essays on Medieval Music in Honor ofDavid G. Hughes, ed. G.M. Boone (Cambridge, MA, 1995), 395–413

D. Pesce: Guido d'Arezzo's ‘Regulae rhythmicae’, ‘Prologus inantiphonarium’, and ‘Epistola ad Michaelem’: a Critical Text andTranslation with an Introduction, Annotations, Indices and NewManuscript Inventories (Ottawa, 1999)

For further bibliography, see Organum and Discant.


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lectura 4 guido of arezzo

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