7 Guido d’Arezzo 7

Guido d’Arezzo

(b. c. 990, Arezzo? [Italy]—d. 1050, Avellana?)

G

uido d’Arezzo was a medieval music theorist whose

principles served as a foundation for modern Western

musical notation.

Educated at the Benedictine abbey at Pomposa, Guido

evidently made use of the music treatise of Odo of Saint-

Maur-des-Fossés and apparently developed his principles

of staff notation there. He left Pomposa in about 1025

because his fellow monks resisted his musical innovations,

and he was appointed by Theobald, bishop of Arezzo, as a

teacher in the cathedral school and commissioned to write

the Micrologus de disciplina artis musicae. The bishop also

arranged for Guido to give ( c. 1028) to Pope John XIX an

antiphonary he had begun in Pomposa.

Guido seems to have gone to the Camaldolese monas-

tery at Avellana in 1029, and his fame developed from

there. Many of the 11th-century manuscripts notated in

the new manner came from Camaldolese houses.

The fundamentals of the new method consisted in

the construction by thirds of a system of four lines, or

staff, and the use of letters as clefs. The red F-line and the

yellow C-line were already in use, but Guido added a black

line between the F and the C and another black line above

the C. The neumes could now be placed on the lines and

spaces between and a defi nite pitch relationship estab-

lished. No longer was it necessary to learn melodies by

rote, and Guido declared that his system reduced the 10

years normally required to become an ecclesiastical singer

to a year.

Guido was also developing his technique of solmization,

described in his Epistola de ignoto cantu. There is no evidence

that the Guidonian hand , a mnemonic device associated