Guido d'Arezzo

Remember the song ‘Do-Re-Mi’ from Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music?  You know,

Do, a deer, a female deer
Ra, a drop of golden sun
Me, a name I call myself
Fa, a long long way to run
So, a needle pulling thread
La, a note to follow so
Te, a drink with jam and bread
That will bring us back to Do.

As a kid, I assumed these silly syllables were just that –nonsense dreamed up by the lyricist.  Not so (or sol, as we will see)!  Do, Re, Mi, and the others have a long and interesting history.  They are key players in the story of how Guido d’Arezzo, an eleventh-century Italian monk, changed the way music was taught and notated.

Arezzo Cathedral

Not much is known about the life of Guido d’Arezzo.  He was born in the late 990’s and became a Benedictine monk in the monastery of Pomposa, on the Adriatic coast of Italy. He quickly made a name for himself with his musical knowledge and thoughts on how to improve the teaching of Gregorian chants.  But many of his fellow monks felt threatened by his revolutionary ideas, forcing Guido to move on.  In 1025, in relocated to the city of Arezzo where he was responsible for teaching Gregorian chants to the cathedral’s choir.  Prior to Guido, singers learned chants by listening to a teacher pick out the notes on a monochord, a one-stringed instrument that could play one note at a time.  Learning a new chant could take weeks and remembering it years later was all but impossible.

At Arezzo, Guido revolutionized the teaching and annotation of music with three innovations.  First, he introduced the concept of the hexachord, a six-note sequence with the same interval pattern: step, step, half-step, step, step.   The inherent pattern of the hexachord allowed the singer to find all the notes of a chant in the same hexachord by simply jumping the appropriate interval.  By overlapping the hexachords at the half-steps, the singer could sing the entire range of musical notes. If a chant required notes from more than one hexachord, the singer switched from one to the other by a process called transposition.  While this system feels awkward to us today, it was a breakthrough for singers in the eleventh century. 

Second, Guido assigned each note of the hexachord a syllable for easy recognition.  These syllables came from a popular hymn, Ut Queant Laxis (the Hymn to St. John the Baptist) in which each phrase starts a pitch higher than the previous one.  The chant conveniently climbs the hexachord with each successive phrase.  Guido assigned the first syllable of each phrase to each note of the hexachord: Ut, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La.    The half-step became known as Mi-Fa interval and the method of finding pitches with these syllables became known as Solmization.  With the solmization technique, a singer would learn the syllables associated with each note of a chant and could quickly sight-sing the entire chant by singing the pitches of each syllable.  Transposition to other hexachords took some time to sort out but, even so, a new chant could be learned in a matter of hours rather than days.

The Guidonian Hand was a device to facilitate
 learning the overlapping hexachords. 

As the system gained popularity, quick tricks were added to help singers jump from one hexachord to another.  Seven hexachords are needed to cover the entire range of musical tones.  Each tone could therefore occur in multiple hexachords.  For example, the pitch “C” is “sol” in the F hexachord, “fa” in the G hexachord, or “ut” in the C hexachord.  Therefore, that pitch is known as “C-sol-fa-ut”.  Here’s a fun linguistic fact: the lowest pitch in the musical scale, known as Gamma, is only found in one hexachord - and it’s an “ut”.  This low note was referred to as “Gamma-ut” which when contracted to “Gamut” was used to describe the entire range of musical notes.  So today, when you say something “runs the gamut”, remember Guido, solmization, and the hexachord.   

Guido d'Arezzo's four line staff, red line indicating F,
and clef mark can be seen in this example.

Guido’s third innovation regarded musical notation.  Obviously, music isn’t going to last long if you can’t write it down.  Before Guido, musical notation was ambiguous and unclear.  Guido corrected this by drawing four horizontal lines on a piece of paper with each line assigned to a specific note of the scale.  One line was yellow and one red to indicate “C” and “F” respectively.  He also added a clef to the beginning of the line to mark “C”.  With this notation, it was possible to accurately record each note of a chant by placing a mark on or between the lines of the staff.  While we no longer use Guido’s colors, the clef mark still appears at the beginning of every piece of music written today.

Guido d’Arezzo wrote several treatises describing his system and techniques including Micrologus, his most important work.  These writings circulated through the medieval world and changed the way music was taught.  Pope John XIX was so impressed that he invited Guido to come to Rome.  Poor health forced him to return to Arezzo where he lived out the rest of his life. Guido died around the year 1050.

A millennium later, many of Guido’s innovations live on.  Solmization was rediscovered in 19^th century England and is still used to teach sight-singing.  “Ut” was changed to “Do” because it’s easier to sing.  “Te” was added later to complete the octave.  Many sing “So”, rather than “Sol”, but that’s probably because the ‘L’ slid into the “La”.  Even though the chromatic scale superseded Guido’s hexachords, the musical staff (with an added fifth line and no colors) and various clef marks remain in use today.

So, if you can read music, you have Guido d’Arezzo to thank.

Reisenweaver, Anna J., Guido of Arezzo and his Influence of Music Learning, Dept. Music and Worship, Cedarville University. 2012

Roth, Susan L. Do Re Mi: If You Can Read Music, Thank Guido d'Arezzo. Houghton Mifflin Co., Boston, 2006.


  

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