The next great name in music history is Guido d’Arezzo, a Benedictine monk (995–1050), famous for his valuable additions to music.
He invented the four-line staff, using both lines and spaces and giving a definite place on the staff to each sound:
| Yellow line | C———————————— |
| Black line | ............. |
| Red line | F———————————— |
| Black line | ............. |
In the Middle Ages, the men did most of the singing so the music was written in a range to suit their voices. C is middle C, and F the bass clef.
All music had to be written by hand and the monks made wonderful parchment copies of works composed for the church services. They soon grew careless about the yellow lines and red lines, so Guido placed the letters C and F at the beginning of the lines instead of using the colored lines.
Sometimes there were three lines to a staff, sometimes four, five, and even eleven! The use of clefs showing which line was C or F, made reading of music much easier. At the end of the 16th century the question of the number of lines to the staff was definitely decided, then they used four lines for the plain chant and five for all secular music. By calling the fifth line of the eleven, middle C, two staffs of five lines resulted—the grand staff of today.
Here is a table to show you how clefs grew:
Hucbald built his scales in groups of four tones like the Greek tetrachords but Guido extended this tetrachord to a hexachord or six-toned scale, and by overlapping the hexachords, he built a series of scales to which he gave the name, gamut, because it started on the G which is the first note of our grand staff (lowest line, bass clef) and the Greek word for G is “Gamma.”
