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Guido
d'Arezzo
Guido
d'Arezzo (c. 990-c. 1033), music theorist.
Educated at the Benedictine Abbey of
Pomposa near Ferrara, Italy, he trained
the singers and, together with a Brother
Michael, created an antiphoner (a
collection of antiphons, now lost) using a
revolutionary notational system. He moved
to Arezzo around 1025, was employed by
Bishop Theodaldus to teach the cathedral
singers, and wrote his influential
treatise, the Micrologus. Around 1028 he
was summoned to Rome by Pope John XIX to
explain his antiphoner, but due to ill
health left in the summer.
He
was invited back to Pomposa but settled
near Arezzo, probably at the Camaldolese
monastery of Avellana. The surviving
prologue to Guido's antiphoner, the Aliae
Regulae, is the first theoretical
description of the 4-line stave (still the
standard for the notation of plainsong),
with its lines and spaces relating to the
notes of the scale (a, b, c, and so on),
thereby enabling singers to read music
rather than rely on memory. The Micrologus
("Little Discourse") describes a gamut of
21 scale steps; the modes and their
characteristics; and contrapuntal
techniques for organum including emphasis
on the interval of the 4th rather than the
5th and acceptable approaches to
cadence.
The
Regulae Rhythmicae, an additional prologue
to his antiphoner, explained the colouring
of the stave lines c (yellow) and f (red),
these being the two degrees of the
white-note scale above the semitone
intervals (b-c and e-f), which singers had
difficulty in locating. The Epistola de
Ignoto Cantu, a letter to Brother Michael,
describes the still-used teaching device
of solmization (Sol-fa), in which the
syllables ut, re, mi, fa, sol, and la
(derived from a Latin hymn text), denote
the degrees of the scale in any
key.
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