Guido of Arezzo

Guido was a monk of the Benedictine order from the Italian city-state of Arezzo. Recent research has dated his Micrologus to 1025 or 1026; since Guido stated in a letter that he was 34 when he wrote it, his birthdate is presumed to be around 991 or 992. His early career was spent at the monastery of Pomposa, on the Adriatic coast near Ferrara. While there, he noted the difficulty that singers had in remembering Gregorian chants. He came up with a method for teaching the singers to learn chants in a short time, and quickly became famous throughout north Italy. However, he attracted the hostility of the other monks at the abbey, prompting him to move to Arezzo, a town which had no abbey, but which did have a large group of singers needing training.

Related Topics:
Monk - Benedictine - Italian - Arezzo - 1025 - 1026 - 991 - 992 - Pomposa - Adriatic - Ferrara - Singer - Gregorian chant

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While at Arezzo, he developed new technologies for teaching, including the staff notation and the "do-re-mi" (Diatonic) scale, in which the name of the single notes were taken from the initial syllables of the seven verses of a hymn, Ut queant laxis (at the beginning, "do" was called "ut"). This may have been based on his earlier work at Pomposa, but the antiphoner that he wrote there is lost. The Micrologus, written at the cathedral at Arezzo, contains Guido's teaching method as it had developed by that time. Soon it had attracted the attention of Pope John XIX, who invited Guido to Rome. Most likely he went there in 1028, but he soon returned to Arezzo, due to his poor health. Nothing is known of him after this time, except that his lost antiphoner was probably completed in 1030.

Related Topics:
Diatonic - Hymn - Ut queant laxis - Pope John XIX - 1028

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In Guido's method, the simple placement of lines allowed those reading musical notation to know where on the scale a particular note should be sung, moving from a relative scale (useful to those needing a reminder of where to sing) to an absolute scale.

Related Topics:
Scale - Relative scale - Absolute scale

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Guido of Arezzo is also the namesake of GUIDO Music Notation, a format for computerized representation of musical scores.

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