Mr. Guido

 

(entry for 6/28/2024)

Whenever we read or write a music note on a music staff, we have Guido d’Arezzo to thank. He invented modern music notation, with all its plusses and minuses, and while many musicians and non-musicians have attempted to replace his invention with something else, all have failed, or are in the process of failing.

 

Now please don’t misunderstand. I’m not saying he invented the idea of music notation. At least as early as 600BC, the Greeks had a method for writing music down. But it gave no precise measures of pitch, only relative ones, and it used words and diagrams, not notes. We can today go back and read what the musicians of that time said, but we have only the vaguest notion what they meant.

 

The system that Mr. Guido invented can still be read and understood today, though some aspects have evolved over time.

 

Nobody seems to know for sure when he was born. Some authorities say 985AD. Some say 995. He was certainly still alive in the year 1030, when his method was published, but after that we lose track of him. Nobody knows when or how he died. The monastery where he lived did not keep good records, and he was only a lowly monk, not somebody of importance.  (The artwork above is only someone's impression of what he must have looked like if he lived to an old age. We have no description anywhere of his actual appearance.)

 

As you can see in the picture of him, each music staff had only four lines, not the current five, and (what seem to us now to be) the note heads were strangely shaped.  Some were trapezoids, some were squares tilted into diamond shapes, some were squares in normal configuration. They weren't called 'notes,' by the say. They were called 'neumes.' (That's the plural. The singular is 'neum.'  The words also could be spelled with a 'p' in front: pneum and pneumes.  (As in pneumonia!)  Either spelling was pronounced the same way. The various shapes did not tell the length of notes, only the pitches. A method to show length developed over the next couple of hundred years, and these new shapes, consisting of empty rectangles, squares, and ovals, were the first examples of what we now call 'notes.'

 

As mentioned elsewhere in this series of posts, females were not allowed to sing in church. Choirs consisted of young boys and mature men, some of whom had been castrated to retain their boyish voices. Written choir music consisted of two different staves, one for the high voices of the boys and castrati, one for the lower voices of the intact men. The bottom line of the high-pitched staff was marked with a clef sign which indicated the note we now call G, and which Guido and other Italians called ‘Sol.’ The top line of the lower-pitched staff was marked with a clef sign which meant the note F, which was known then as ‘Fa.’ (The C-clef or Do-clef had been invented also, but was not used yet in Mr. Guido's new notation system, though it soon would be.)

 

People who have learned to read the present-day Treble and Bass Clefs, which evolved from those early G and F clefs, are sometimes startled to realize that both staves were read exactly the same way. By that I mean that if the top line of a staff is F and the bottom line is G, then the lines and spaces mean exactly the same note names. In either case, the lines mean (from bottom to top) G B D F.

 

There was a difference, however.  The boys’ voices were written two octaves above those of the men. That is, the G at the bottom of the bass clef was exactly two octaves lower than the bottom line of the treble clef, and the top F of the treble clef was exactly two octaves above the top F of the bass clef.

 

This arrangement quickly became unwieldy, because most boys can easily sing below G, usually down at least to what we call Middle C. And most men can easily sing above that F. Tenors in fact routinely sing to the F an octave above that! What I’m trying to say is that men’s voices and boys’ voices actually overlap rather than being two octaves apart as Guido’s system would have it be. This became a sticking point for musicians trying to learn the new system, so about two hundred years later another man, Ugolindo da Fonti, added a fifth line above the Bass Clef staff, and another fifth line below the Treble Clef staff. This brought the two staves closer together in pitch, which was good in that it better reflected the reality of the various voice ranges, but not so good in that the staves were no longer arranged with identical pitches. The new bottom line of the Treble Clef staff was E (Mi). The new top line of the Bass Clef staff was A (La). This new arrangement led eventually to the ‘sayings’ we now use to remember the pitch names: Treble Clef lines: Every Good Bird Does Fly. And spaces FACE. And Bass Clef lines: Great Big Dogs Fight Anything. And spaces: All Cows Eat Grass, or All Cars Eat Gas. (Take your pick.) What the Latin-based language countries did and do to memorize Do Re Mi Fa Sol La Si Do, I have no idea.

 

Since there was still a gap between the two staves, musicians had to invent Ledger Lines, so that the intervening pitches could be indicated, and also so that pitches above the Treble staff and below the Bass staff could be indicated.

 

Thus it was finally possible to show that the two staves, or rather the two types of voices indicated by the two staves, really did overlap, as they do.

 

The next thing we are going to cover is the shapes of the various notes, or rather of the note-heads of the various notes. That’s for next time. We'll also talk some more about Mr. Guido.

 

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If you want to see other posts in this Music Blog series, please click HERE.

 

If you want to see posts in my other series, the Memory Blog, please click HERE.