II
However, before considering the new diaphony, we have still to trace the further progress of the organum of Hucbald and Odo. The next theorist of importance was Guido of Arezzo. To Guido have been attributed at various times most of the important inventions and reforms of early polyphonic music, among them descant, organum and diaphony, the hexachordal system, the staff for notation, and even the spinet; but the wealth of tradition which clothed him so gloriously has, as in the case of many others, been gradually stripped from him, till we find him disclosed as a brilliantly learned monk and a famous teacher, author of but few of the works which possibly his teaching inspired. He has recently been identified with a French monk of the Benedictine monastery of St. Maur des Fosses.[66] He was born at or near Arezzo about 990, and in due time became a Benedictine monk. He must have had remarkable talent for music, for about 1022 Pope Benedict VIII, hearing that he had invented a new method for teaching singing, invited him to Rome to question him about it. He visited Rome again a few years later on the express invitation of Pope John XIX, and this time brought with him a copy of the Antiphonarium, written according to his own method of notation. The story goes that the pope was so impressed by the new method that he refused to allow Guido to leave the audience chamber until he had himself learned to sing from it. After this he tried to persuade Guido to remain in Rome, but Guido, on the plea of ill-health, left Rome, promising to return the following year. However, he accepted an invitation from the abbot of a monastery near Ferrara to go there and teach singing to the monks and choir-boys; and he stayed there several years, during which he wrote one of the most important of his works, the Micrologus, dedicated to the bishop of Arezzo. Later he became abbot of the Monastery of Santa Croce near Arezzo, and he died there about the year 1050. During the time of his second visit to Rome he wrote the famous letter to Michael, a monk at Pomposa, which has led historians to believe that he was actually the inventor of a new division of the scales into groups of six notes, called hexachorda, and a new system of teaching based on this division.
The case of Guido is typical of the period in which he lived. Very evidently an unusually gifted teacher, as Hucbald was a hundred years before him, his influence was strong over the communities with which he came into contact, and spread abroad after his death, so that many innovations which were probably the results of slow growth were attributed to his inventiveness. The Micrologus contains many rules for the construction of organum below a cantus firmus, which are not very much advanced beyond those of Hucbald and Odo. The old strict diaphony is still held by him in respect, though the free is much preferred. To those intervals which result from the ‘free’ treatment of the organizing voice, however, he gives names, and he is conscious of their effect; so that, where Hucbald and Odo confined themselves to giving rules for the movement of the organizing voice in such a way as to avoid the harsh tritone even at the cost of other dissonances, Guido gives rules to direct singers in the use of these dissonances for themselves, which, as we have seen, in the earlier treatises were considered accidental. This marks a real advance. But there is in Guido’s works the same attempt merely to make rules, to harness music to logical theory, that we found in Hucbald’s and Odo’s; and it is again hard to believe that his method of organizing was in common practice, or that it represents the style of church singing of his day. From the accounts of the early Christians, from the elaborate ornamentation of the plain-song in mediæval manuscripts in which it is first found written down, and from later accounts of the ‘descanters’ we are influenced to believe that music was sung in the church with a warmth of feeling, sometimes exalted, sometimes hysterical even to the point of stamping with the feet and gesticulating, from which the standardized bald ornamentation of Guido is far removed. Furthermore, the next important treatises after Guido’s, one by Johannes Cotto, and an anonymous one called Ad Organum Faciendum, deal with the subject of organum in a wholly new way and show an advance which can hardly be explained unless we admit that a freer kind of organum was much in use in Guido’s day than that which he describes and for which he makes his rules.
But before proceeding with the development of the early polyphony after the time of Guido, we have to consider two inventions in music which have been for centuries placed to his credit. In the first place he is supposed to have divided the scale, which, it will be remembered, had always been considered as consisting of groups of four notes called tetrachords placed one above the other, into overlapping groups of six notes called hexachords. The first began on G, the second on C, the third on F, and the others were reduplications of these at the octave. The superiority of this system over the system of tetrachords, inherited from the Greeks, was that in each hexachord the halftone occupies the same position, that is, between the third and fourth steps.[67] It is not certain whether Guido was the first so to divide the scale, but he evidently did much to perfect the new system.
There has long been a tradition that he was the first to give those names to the notes of the hexachord which are in use even at the present day. Having noticed that the successive lines of a hymn to St. John the Baptist began on successive notes of the scale, the first on G, the second on A, the third on B, etc., up to the sixth note, namely, E, he is supposed to have associated the first syllable of each line with the note to which it was sung. The hymn reads as follows:
Ut queant laxis
Resonari fibris
Mira gestorum
Famuli tuorum
Solve polluti
Labii reatum
Sancte Joannes.
Hence G was called ut; A, re; B, mi; C, fa; D, sol; and E, la. These are the notes of the first hexachord, and these names are given to the notes of every hexachord. The half-step therefore was always mi-fa. Since the hexachords overlapped, several tones acquired two or even three names. For instance, the second hexachord began on C, which was also the fourth note of the first hexachord, and in the complete system this C was C-fa-ut. The fourth hexachord began on G an octave above the first. This G was not only the lowest note of the fourth hexachord but the second of the third and the fourth of the second. Therefore, its complete name was G-sol-re-ut. The lowest G, which Guido is said to have added to perfect the system, was called gamma. It was always gamma-ut, from which our word gamut. The process of giving each note its proper series of names was called solmisation.
The system seems to us clumsy and inadequate. We cannot but ask ourselves why Guido did not choose the natural limit of the octave for his groups instead of the sixth. However, it was a great improvement over the yet clumsier system of the tetrachords, and was of great service to musicians down to comparatively recent times. One may find no end of examples of its use in the works of the great polyphonic writers. As a help to students in learning it, the system of the Guidonian Hand was invented, whereby the various tones and syllables of the hexachords were assigned to the joints of the hand and could be counted off on the hand much as children are taught in kindergarten to count on their fingers. That Guido himself invented this elementary system is doubtful, though his name has become associated with it.
The Guidonian Hand.
Guido must also be credited with valuable improvements in the art of notation. In his day two systems were in use. One employed the letters of the alphabet, capitals for the lowest octave, small letters for the next and double letters for the highest. This was exact, though difficult and clumsy. The other employed neumes (see Chap. V) superimposed over the words (of the text to be sung) at distances varying according to the pitch of the sound. This, though essentially graphic, was inaccurate. Composers were already accustomed to draw two lines over the text, each of which stood for a definite pitch, one for F, colored red, and one for C, a fifth above, colored yellow, but the pitch of notes between or below or above these lines was, of course, still only indefinitely indicated by the distance of the neumes from them. Guido therefore added another line between these two, representing A, and one above representing E, both colored black. Thus the four-line staff was perfected. It has remained the orthodox staff for plain-song down to the present day. This improvement of notation, in addition to the hexachordal system and the invention of solmisation, have all had a lasting influence upon music, and through his close connection with them Guido of Arezzo stands out as one of the most brilliant figures in the early history of music.