FIG. 3-6 The “Guidonian hand” as represented in a thirteenth-century Bavarian manuscript.
Armed with the memorized and internalized gamut, a singer could parse a written melody into its
constituent intervals without hearing it or hunting for it on a monochord. The first phrase of Salve Regina
(Ex. 3-12b), for example, could be seen at a glance to lie exactly within the compass of the natural
hexachord, in which it would be solmized with these voces: /la sol la re/(Salve);/la sol fa mi fa sol fa mi
re/(Regina);/ut re re ut re mi fa sol re mi ut re / (mater misericordiae). All of Regina caeli (Ex. 3-
12a) lies within a single soft hexachord. The beginning of the second phrase (“Quia quem meruisti”), the
first that encompasses the entire range of the chant, would take these voces: /ut sol sol la la sol fa mi re ut
re mi mi/. Finally, here are the voces for the first “Kyrie” acclamation and the first “Christe” in Kyrie IX
(Ex. 3-5):
Kyrie:/ re fa sol la sol fa mi re fa re ut re ut re fa sol fa mi re/(natural hexachord).
Christe:/ mi mi re fa mi re re ut re fa re mi/(soft hexachord).
Except for the beginning of the second “Kyrie” invocation, which extends down into the first hard (or
“gamma”) hexachord (syllables: re fa sol sol), the whole of Kyrie IX can be solmized using one natural
and one soft hexachord. It would be a good exercise for the reader. Another good exercise would be to
seek out phrases in the chants used as examples in this book so far that exceed the interval of a sixth, and
that therefore require a mutation for their proper solmization. Salve Regina contains a number of
interesting examples of this type. The phrase “Ad te suspiramus, gementes et flentes” requires a mutation
from natural to soft and back again, thus:/re fa la (think mi)sol re re ut re mi (think la), re fa sol sol re fa
mi re ut/. The phrase “Eia ergo, Advocata nostra, illos tuos misericordes oculos” is tricky: it begins in
the soft hexachord, and descends into the natural; but when the upper range is regained, mutation must be
not to the soft hexachord but to the hard, since the melody (as the alert singer will have scanned ahead to
notice) has a B-natural, not a B-flat, thus:/ut ut re ut re mi mi, sol re mi re ut (think fa)re sol la (think
re), sol sol fa mi fa sol re sol fa re ut (think fa)la sol fa mi fa mi re ut/. At “nobis,” however, where the
B-flat is called for, so is the soft hexachord: / re la (think mi)fa mi/.
Armed with these techniques, and with Guido’s hand stored in memory for ready reference, a singer
could truly sing at sight, or (as Guido put it in the title of his famous epistle of 1032) “sing an unknown
melody.” Reinforced over centuries of practice, this pedagogical aid wrought enormous changes in the
way music was disseminated and thought about. When transmission from composer to performer could