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M
odern Western musical
notation has its origins
in Europe’s monasteries
at the end of the first millennium.
The earliest musical symbols,
called neumes, were written aids
for chants that used simple pen
strokes to remind the monks if
the music moved up or down, or
remained on the same tone.
Diastematic, or “heightened,”
neumes brought more clarity
to notated chant by formalizing
the note shapes and imagining
a single horizontal line across
the page. This gave a “horizon”
against which the singer could
work out the pitch. Nonetheless,
heightened neumes were open
to misinterpretation and greater
precision was needed.Invention of the staff
The solution, credited to Guido
d’Arezzo, an Italian monk and
music theorist (though he may
have only formalized what was
then current practice) was to draw
four lines across the page, allowing
the singer to precisely gauge the
melody’s movement. Guidonian
notation sometimes has one of the
lines in yellow ink to show the note
C, and one in red to show F, sopitch was now not only fixed from
note to note, but the singer knew
at a glance on which note to start.
Guido’s treatise Micrologus
(c.1026) describes the singing
aid for which he is best known, the
Guidonian Hand. If a modern singer
has to describe a particular note,
they might picture the continuous
row of notes using seven letters
from A to G, repeated over the
seven octaves of a piano. To specify
a particular “C,” the singer mightThe Guidonian Hand was a system
invented to teach monks the easiest
way to reference the 20 notes of
medieval liturgical music.IN CONTEXT
FOCUS
Early music notationBEFORE
500 ce Boethius, a Roman
senator and philosopher, writes
De institutione musica, which
was still in use as a music
primer in the 16th century.935 ce In France, Odo of
Cluny’s Enchiridion musices
becomes the first book to
name musical pitches with
the letters A to G.AFTER
1260 German music theorist
Franco of Cologne writes
Ars cantus mensurabilis,
which adds refinements to
Guido’s notation.1300 In Paris, Johannes
de Garlandia writes De
mensurabili musica, describing
the six rhythmic modes.UT, RE, MI, FA,
SOL, LA
MICROLOGUS (c. 1026), GUIDO D’AREZZO
US_024-025_Guido_d_Arezzo.indd 24 26/03/18 1:00 PM