Below is reproduced the full Chapter 20 (pages 442-464) from the book “The Christian West and its singers, the first thousand years” by Christopher Page.

This is a long but worthy read. For those who just want some highlights, I provide below some shortcuts to the paragraphs I found most remarkable (click on the sum-up phrase below to go to the paragraph from the book).

• In the 11th century, a melody existed as a feeling is the throat
• The clerics who learned the Gregorian Chant repertoire did not have much time for prayer and other more normal activities,
• This is why Guido d’Arezzo considered singers to be “foolish”,
• Fighting the heresy of simony, the commerce of ecclesial offices like that of cantor, was for Guido a strong motivation to make learning the repertoire more efficient and accessible,
• Another motivation was to provide a common reference for learning, so the strife resulting from rivalry between teachers may be easier to resolve,
• Guido d’Arezzo and St Peter Damian,
• Invention of the stave: priority in helping the singer know where the semitone steps lay,
• The invention of the stave is contemporary and likely related to the invention of the abacus (the ancestor of the calculator) by Gerbert of Aurillac,
• Guido goes to Rome to show Pope John XIX how he and many can now learn music they have never heard before,
• Guido was an ascetic committed to promoting peace.

Beginning of the book’s chapter:

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“IN OUR TIME, OF ALL MEN, SINGERS ARE THE MOST FOOLISH”:

GUIDO OF AREZZO AND THE INVENTION OF THE STAVE

The Unknown Guido

In the eleventh century, and indeed long after, a plainsong melody principally existed as a feeling in the throat, a sensation in the ear and a penumbra of associations created by years of repetition, by the lengthening and shortening of days or by the arrival and disappearance of seasonal fruits at the common table. Many singers could add associations that reached to the deepest layers of their childhood memory when joys and injustices were felt with an especial keenness: memories of teachers and the praise or blame that they apportioned, reminiscences of the rooms where they passed their boyhood learning the chants, day after day, occasionally receiving the expected beatings when they were negligent. In relation to this dense complex of memory and association, the visual appearance of chants in notation may have counted for little in the minds of many singers.

There is no sign that the composers active between 900 and 1100, for example, were anxious to have their new plainsongs recorded in musical notation, and even the clergy of a great church like Notre-Dame de Paris expected their plainsong to be performed from memory in the central Middle Ages. The emergence of practical notations in the ninth century (to judge by what survives) began the slow process of creating visual analogues of vocal sound, providing a means to detach the music, however gradually, from particular modes of existence that could be sustained only by the kinds of collegiality that kept individuals together for long periods. Nonetheless, the question of what made musical notation “useful” to any particular individual in the tenth century remains a question about different ways of living some form of common life and balancing its demands. A singer’s need for notation (if he had one) might vary considerably according to the office he held, the books it was his business to consult, the general scrupulosity of the church in which he served, the time that accomplished singers could spare to train him, and much else besides. Any form of musical notation therefore implicitly set out a scheme for using the gift of time to better advantage and profit of the spirit.

In the ninth century, when the repertory of Gregorian chant for the Mass was being consolidated but much still remained to be done for the music of the Office, churchmen began to register how much time was spent in becoming proficient in both repertories. In 838, Agobard of Lyons insisted that “too many singers study from earliest youth until the hoariness of old age” to learn their chants, so that they can be numbered among the cantors; as a result they neglect their “spiritual studies, that is to say readings and the study of divine eloquence”. Agobard’s contemporary Aurelian would have looked down upon any cantor who was guilty of such neglect, but the passage nonetheless suggests an impoverishment of studies, and even of the spiritual life, that Aurelian would surely have recognized though it was no part of his literary purpose to say so. To be sure, Agobard’s writings relate to a particular phase in the evolution of Frankish-Roman chant when several influential bishops were seeking to make changes to the Office antiphoners of their churches, and the changes he contemplated concerned the verbal not the musical texts; he also implicitly concedes the status that the cantor had acquired in the wake of the Carolingian reforms of liturgy, for some clearly judged the rewards of the cantor’s office to be worth the long years of study “from earliest youth until the hoariness of old age”. But even though much of Agobard’s work must be understood in a polemical and Lyonnais context, his complaint that many singers were compelled to neglect other studies can be heard in a thin but important scatter of later sources. Much the same observation appears in a treatise possibly compiled in the region of Milan around 1000, the Dialogus de Musica, which claims that some singers “devote fifty years of their lives in vain to the practice and study of singing”. The compiler of another brief De Musica, long attributed to Odo of Cluny but also probably Italian, insists upon the use of the monochord letters in teaching chant, for without them 

we lose as much time in learning the antiphoner as we would need to spend getting to know divine authority and grammar; and what is worse, no amount of time is enough to reach such a perfection of study that we can learn even the smallest antiphon without the labour of a master, and if we happen to forget it, there is no way in which we can recover our memory of it.

These are some of the reasons why the most famous of all medieval music theorists, Guido of Arezzo, thought singers to be the most foolish (fatui) of men, or rather to be those whose greatest labours were likely to produce the smallest results.(1)

The four authentic treatises by Guido, often called Guido of Arezzo, have probably been more intensively read during the last thousand years than any other writings composed by a musician. They have almost invariably been studied as a musician’s work, but that approach imposes some unexpected limitations and has even made some seminal aspects of Guido’s writing invisible. Consider a brief passage in an authoritative English translation of his Epistola ad Michahelem, a letter written to a fellow monk at the abbey of Pomposa in the Po Valley. Among other things, Guido uses this letter to explain the system of notation he has invented, essentially the direct ancestor of the staff-notation that is still in use today and the device that has in many ways defined the course of Western music. He also describes how it received papal approval from Pope John XIX (1024-32). Guido insists in the letter that his new system will help novices to learn their plainsong more quickly, contracting a lifetime’s work into just two years. So far so good; this is the Guido one expects to meet from nearly a thousand years of the reception of his works. Yet Guido is not content to say only that his new method will allow a lifetime of study to be accomplished in twenty-four months, although that is already saying a great deal; he also maintains that monks and clergy will now have more time for prayer, for the recitation of psalms, for nocturnal vigils and for the other works of devotion. Referring to the nocturnal vigils that represent one of the more ascetic devotions he has in mind, Guido envisages that monks and clergy will now be able to keep them cum puritate, “with purity”.(2)

That simple expression, which distils so much of the political and ecclesiastical history of the eleventh century, is missing from the one standard English translation of the Epistola at Michahelem, thus effacing Guido’s meaning at precisely the point where his conceptions need the most careful attention because they cannot readily be mapped onto those of today. The purity of monks and especially of clergy, meaning freedom from the contagion of money or sexual contact, among other things, was a matter of intense concern in the eleventh-century West, and it is traceable from the early decades of the new millennium when town-dwellers in the castellated communities of northern Italy and elsewhere began to demand higher standards of ritual purity from their clergy, through to the late years of the century when the dispute concerning the proper domains of temporal and spiritual power became painfully acute. There is therefore a wealth of material at hand to interpret what Guido means by expecting monks and clergy to attend their vigils cum puritate now that they will be able to complete their training in plainsong more quickly. His new notation will give them more time to enhance and deepen the quality of their spiritual life; they will have the means, if they are prepared to make the effort, to be cleansed from any temptation to simony and have more time fervently to pray for freedom from the troubling dreams and phantasmata that sully the body in the hours of nocturnal prayer and have effects that are worse still in sleep. Guido, long remembered by his patrons as an ascetic (Pl. 81), has restored to monks and clergy the time they need to live Christian lives to a high standard of observance and rectitude.(3)

A measure of insensitivity to the ascetic temper of Guido’s life and work has sometimes gone further in recent years than simply overlooking a seminal expression in one of his books. In many cases, the neglect has extended to the point of ignoring a complete treatise that he left to posterity. Guido is commonly regarded today as the author of four works, all of them musical tracts, whereas his legacy almost certainly runs to five treatises, the last being devoted to a sharply different matter, or so modern habits of thought make it seem. To be fair, the abundant transmission of Guido’s musical works gives no clue to the existence of this extra item, which is a trenchant letter on the subject of simony (the sale or purchase of ecclesiastical offices) addressed to one of the most exalted ecclesiastics in Italy, Archbishop Heribert of Milan (1018-45). What is more, this letter, now commonly known as the Epistola Widonis, was widely attributed in the late eleventh century and beyond to a Pope Paschal. A pope will trump a choirmaster any day, so it is hardly surprising that Guido has principally been regarded as a somewhat lowly choirmaster who, in his determination to do his daily work more efficiently, evolved a means of recording the pitches of a melody so dependable that no other system has ever commanded widespread acceptance in a Western musical tradition. That is enough to remember anybody by. Why look further? The answer is that Guido’s motives for devising his notation reach far beyond the demands of the choir school to his concerns about the state of the contemporary Church. Something similar might be said of all the medieval writers who laboured in the vineyard of music theory; each one knew that the accord of well-trained singers gave unique expression to fraternal caritas and to the Church as the company of the faithful. Yet Guido’s body of work, taken as a whole with the fifth item, the Epistola Widonis on the subject of simony, is exceptional for both the depth and the virulence of its engagement with developments, both political and ecclesiastical, which gave the Latin West its consolidated medieval form.(4)

Simony, invariably construed as a heresy and broadly defined as trafficking in the Holy Spirit, takes its name from the primordial moment in the nascent Church’s campaign to free the workings of the Spirit from any contact with the fees and bribes associated with the offices and rites of the pagan temples. (Acts of the Apostles 8: 18, ‘And when Simon [Magus] saw that through the laying on of the apostles’ hands the Holy Ghost was given, he offered money’.) The great movement of conscience that marked the eleventh century made simony a matter of renewed concern. It introduced many different forms of impure or rapacious motive into the life of the Church, set a temporal value on spiritual offices and turned bishops and abbots into political figures. The Peace Council of Poitiers (1000/14) forbade clergy to seek offerings for any sacraments, including penance, while the Council of Bourges (1031) insisted that clergy should not receive any gift for ordinations. The Council of Gerona (1068) condemned ‘the detestable heresy of simony’, showing how the language of condemnation became more virulent as the eleventh century progressed. In the Epistola Widonis it is already a language of sexually transmitted disease and violation of the female body, for simony “pollutes the chastity of Holy Church with a disgusting contagion”. Barely has the letter begun before the author speaks with the righteous anger of Ezekiel: ‘I say unto the wicked, thou shalt surely die’ (3:18). The author has heard that Archbishop Heribert of Milan confers holy orders in return for gifts or other payments, whence the Holy Spirit thunders through Gregory’ and cries: “Whoever is not greatly inflamed against the heresy of Simony will have the same share as Simon Magus who first committed this disgraceful act, that must be atoned for”. Augustine (actually Fulgentius of Ruspe) comes next in this fiery circle of authorities. “Do not doubt that every heretic and schismatic, however much he may give alms or shed his blood for Christ, is to be given over to the devil and his angels for burning in eternal fire”. Thus it was that Christ ejected the money changers from the Temple, Dathan and Abiron were swallowed up by the ground for soliciting the governance of the priesthood, and Saint Peter placed Simon Magus under perpetual anathema. The Epistola Widonis continues:

It is excessively shameful that the Church should now, in its fullest vigour, succumb to a such a bestial enemy that it had the power to conquer in its infancy with such strength. . . who cannot see that the Masses and prayers of such prelates or priests [guilty of simony] will bring the wrath of God upon the people and not placate him in the way we believe such observances can do? For it is written: ‘Whatsoever is not of faith is sin’ [Romans 14: 23]… When, therefore, do we shun such bishops, abbots, clerics and others if we hear the Masses of those, and pray with those, with whom we take excommunication upon ourselves? Just to believe such men to be priests is to go entirely astray, as Peter said to Simon Magus: ‘Thy money perish with thee, because thou has thought that the gift of God may be purchased with money’ [Acts 8: 20].(5) 

By the 1070s, some well-informed commentators believed that the author of this letter was a certain Wido or Guido (the spelling variant is trivial) and identified him with the musician Guido of Arezzo. The testimony comes from the canonists around Lake Constance between approximately 1076 and 1088. During the last decades of the eleventh century, the see of Constance had a strong tradition of reform, represented among others by the canonist Bernold of Constance (c.1054-1100), who was sufficiently impressed by Guido of Arezzo to borrow the title Micrologus, the name of Guido’s most famous treatise on music, for one of his own works. (No doubt Guido would have made the loan willingly had he lived long enough to know of it, for Bernold’s Micrologus is a commendation of the Roman liturgy.) When Bernold compiled another of his writings, a collaborative letter entitled De Damnatione Schismaticorum, probably in 1076, he had cause to refer to the Epistola Widonis and there he attributed it, as some manuscripts do, to Pope Paschal. This attribution makes no sense, not least because the Epistola, despite the rebuke it offers, clearly looks up to its addressee, the archbishop of Milan. Eventually, Bernold acquired better information. In a manuscript of the letter now at Stuttgart, a near contemporary annotator who is almost certainly Bernold himself has added a marginal note that reveals the result of fresh research into the authorship of the Epistola Widonis. “This letter is not by Pope Paschal”, the note declares, ‘but by a Guido who also wrote a treatise on music; that is what certain men most dedicated to the monastic life assert, who have most diligently investigated this matter with his pupils.”

One would give much to know the identity of the pupils who provided information about Guido, or indeed the identity of the ‘men most dedicated to the monastic life’ that had received the tradition from them. If Guido lived until the 1050s, which is certainly possible, then the traditions gathered about his authorship of the Epistola, first reported in the late 1070s, might have been received from his pupils in the strict sense of that word. If so, then the information came up from the south. Another possibility is that the news descended from the north, perhaps from Regensburg, where the composer Otloh was already copying the complete musical works of Guido in the lifetime of Bernold (see Appendix to Chapter 19, under of ‘Otloh of St Emmeram’). Nothing certain can be said on either count, but it is at least clear from this note that the tradition about Guido and the Epistola Widonis was transmitted by those dedicated to a strict form of the monastic life (religiosissimi; that would fit the abbey of St Emmeram at Regensburg), which says something about the reputation Guido left behind. Bernold refers twice more to the Epistola Widonis, and is careful to call it “the writing of Guido the musician” and “the writing of Guido the musician about simoniacs”.(7) 

For some indication of Guido’s place in a groundswell of dissatisfaction among many laymen, monks and clergy during the first half of the eleventh century, one need only survey a few key events. In 1049, the Lotharingian pope and composer Leo IX used the Council of Rheims to make all the assembled prelates swear that they had not paid for their offices, and that they were therefore free from any taint of simony. The bishop of Langres fled the Council and was deposed; others were in evident difficulty. On to May 1057, the clergy of Milan assembled for the translation of the relics of Saint Nazzaro and suddenly faced an uprising of the laity. The ringleaders of the new movement compelled the clergy to swear that they would observe chastity in future. The leader of the Milanese townsmen, Ariald, soon widened the scope of his attack to encompass simony. His followers, given the insulting name Patarini or ‘rag-pickers’, subsequently dominated the city of Milan for twenty years without actually controlling it, defying the archbishop and placing their own priests in many of the urban churches. It says much about the nature of eleventh-century reform that these two confrontations were impelled by a pope in one case and by a disaffected citizenry on the other, albeit with some clerical and monastic support, just as it reveals much about Guido’s conviction and prescience that he made a prelate of Milan the target of his Epistola Widonis some years before the Patarini took the ecclesiastical affairs of that city in hand. Guido wrote that letter as a lowly churchman addressing an exalted one, and in doing so he gives one of the earliest examples of a development that was fundamental to the rise of the Patarini and for other movements towards reform of the Church in the eleventh century: the right of the lowly to hold their pastors to account and then to rebuke them for their shortcomings, especially in the matter of chastity and simony.

In this, as in many things, the Epistola Widonis permits a deeper reading of Guido the choirmaster and inventor of the first Western notation that was both practical and unambiguously prescriptive in the matter of pitch. Guido’s Epistola ad Michahelem shows the same concern with simony as the Epistola Widonis when he explains his decision not to remain in Rome where John XIX had asked him to teach the papal clergy; Guido returned to his old abbey of Pomposa instead “since now nearly all the bishops have been convicted of the heresy of simony”. The condemnation is lofty and sweeping. Also reminiscent of the Epistola Widonis is the self-possessed and even self-righteous tone detectable in Guido’s troubled relationship with his spiritual father and namesake, the abbot of Pomposa, not least in the somewhat vengeful episode when Guido sought him out to get an apology once the pope had approved the new system of teaching and notation; it seems that the abbot had not encouraged Guido in either. Above all, it is Guido the impassioned corrector of falsity that we meet in both the Epistola Widonis and the musical works: a man who believes he has the right to correct anyone, however exalted, and to remind them what the consequences of negligence will be in the next life. In personal terms, there are signs that this cost Guido dear, and led at least once to exile. If he was prepared for that, it is because he knew that in spiritual terms the stakes were high. When Guido evokes the dissent that can arise among singers who have learned different versions of a chant, or who have remembered the details of a chant differently, he is not inclined to use moderate or reassuring language, still less to be conciliatory. This strife is a “grave mistake”, a gravis error, which produces a “perilous discord” or periculosa discordia, where the meaning of periculosa can only be that it endangers the immortal soul.(8)

There may be another way to place Guido in the wider current of eleventh-century reform, in addition to the Epistola Widonis. His life and writings sometimes intersect with the career of his contemporary Peter Damian, eventually cardinal-bishop of Ostia (1007-72). Damian was one of the most powerful controversialists of the eleventh century, “a notorious and contradictory character” whose many writings and letters argue for the unique position of the Roman Church and for a purification of the religious life. Especially in his earlier years, Damian regarded this great task as a collaborative project, of immense moment, for the emperors and the popes together. A lifelong opponent of simony and a lurid advocate of clerical continence (his polemic against sodomy, the Liber Gomorrhianus, was an embarrassment to many), he was also one of the first to call for a systematic revision of the collections that monks and clergy used to study the past decisions of the Church in council, the material that was soon to become, duly revised and systematized, the body of Canon Law. Damian was also a champion of Rome’s claim to be the ultimate arbiter in all matters concerning the authenticity and orthodoxy of any given chapters in conciliar proceedings. By 1034, he had entered the monastery at Fonte Avellana (about fourteen miles from Gubbio in the Apennines), whose name hovers above the biography of Guido of Arezzo without ever definitively coming to rest. One of the manuscripts traceable to Fonte Avellana may be the major anthology of Damian’s works, now in the Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, where a number of Latin hymns attributed to him are notated, in a Guidonian manner, on dry-point (or very lightly inked) staves with the lines bearing the F-clef and c-clef in colour. In 1040-1, Damian was at Guido’s former monastery of Pomposa, where he compiled the Life of Saint Romuald. Together with Lives of John Gualbert and Dominic of Sora, among others, the Life of Romuald is an outstanding text for recovering what it may have meant for Guido, in the context of monastic renewal in early eleventh-century Italy, to desire (in his own words) a ‘modicum of solitary life’. Damian’s account returns repeatedly to Romuald’s desire for solitude, the heremi desiderium or longing for the hermitage that Guido may indeed have eventually found, to judge by the memory he left behind as an heremita beandus, a blessed hermit (see above, Pl. 81).”

Latinity may provide another link between Peter Damian and Guido. A wide- ranging analysis of cursus, the rhythmic patterns employed at the close of phrases or complete periods in Latin prose, reveals Guido to be the first author of the Middle Ages who prefers the cursus velox, as in álea constitútum. This rhythm is indeed very common in Guido’s writing, and adorns the last words of his famous aphorism: “In our time, of all men, singers are the most foolish” (fátui sunt cantores), which appears in the title of this chapter. The same pattern is common in the prose of Peter Damian and has been taken to suggest that Guido “was educated in the same tradition” as Peter Damian, in the schools of the Po Valley. The dedicatory letter of the Micrologus suggests another, comparable link between the two men. Addressing Bishop Theodaldus with an elegant ellipsis, Guido wishes his master quicquid servus et filius, “whatever a servant and son [would wish]”. There seem to be very few instances of this mode of address before the period of Guido and Peter Damian. The latter uses it three times in letters of the period 1048-65, and also employs the shorter form quicuid servus, which is rare before him. There is probably much more to Guido of Arezzo than will ever meet the eye, and certainly more than the choir school.(10)

Armed with a notation that left no doubt about the melodic contour of a chant, Guido set out to purify the Latin plainsong of the Roman Church according to his own judgement. His task was to free monks and clerics for the daily devotions, with an ascetic character, that would distinguish them sharply and forever from those touched by the impurities of sex and venality. More deeply still, Guido is concerned with the issue of pollution: with the “simony and clerical unchastity [that] represented sources of contagious pollution which infected the body of Christ, stained the church, and hence threatened the corpus christianorum, the Church”. Guido’s notion of an error in plainsong is much more than simply empirical or pragmatic; he is concerned with defilement, and when the first champions of his notation north of the Alps begin to appear they will mostly be advocates of the papal cause in the struggle between regnum and sacerdotium: between Emperor and Pope. That is a matter for the next chapter. For the moment, there is more to say about Guido in the context of the eleventh century: his patrons, the affiliations of his new notational system to contemporary science, and the journey to Rome that gave his new system a papal imprimatur and may even have impelled him to the northern verge of Christendom.(11)

Clefs and Clearances: Guido and the Canossa

Some time in the first decades of the eleventh century, Guido became a monk of Pomposa, near Ferrara. Situated in the eastern marshes of the Po valley, this monastery in the diocese of Ravenna lay close to the routes taken by the Holy Roman Emperors Conrad II and Henry III into Italy. Their recorded journeys led down from cities on the imperial iter like Regensburg, through Brixen to the principal bridgeheads of imperial advance into Italy, Ravenna and Verona. Guido’s master at Pomposa, and the man whom he calls his “spiritual father”, was his namesake Abbot Guido, famous for his asceticism and repeatedly drawn to a life of sylvan solitude: to the discipline of uncooked food taken from the bush and the rigours of a roofless bedchamber. During his abbacy, the monastic church at Pomposa was enlarged and the markedly Roman porch created, probably in 1026, with a panel by the architect whose inscription is visible to this day. It is a fitting monument to an abbot of considerable stature. After his death, his body was taken by the emperor Henry III and interred in the cathedral at Speyer, the mausoleum of the Salian house. (There are some signs that Abbot Guido was not only a spiritual adviser to Henry but also a relative.) The eminence of this abbot, and the importance of the community that he governed at Pomposa, were both of great account to Guido the musician, who describes his abbot as a man most esteemed by God’ and as the head of an abbey that he had made the first in Italy’. For all his own asceticism, Guido did not wish to be associated with a backwater, and was never to be so.(12)

While at Pomposa, Guido passed into the orbit of the most powerful kindred on the Po Plain, the Canossa. Here it is possible to appreciate the singularity of what might be called the Guido moment. In his lifetime, the Canossa had only recently risen to a position of eminence, deriving their wealth from clearances in the Po marshes. One could scarcely wish for a clearer case of an aristocratic house in the eleventh century prospering by clearing land, creating settlements and establishing tenantries. The Canossa combined drainage of the marshlands with a policy of slash and burn to clear woodlands, much of it accomplished by peasants who were rewarded, if that is the right word, by having their communities walled (we are in the early years of the incastellamento) and then subjected to tax and rule by the Canossa. Their male line was rapidly drawing to a close in Guido’s time and finally failed in ross, although the female line was destined to last until 1115 with immense distinction in the person of Matilda of Tuscany (Pls 81 and 82). Guido would have seen the greatest secular magnate of the house, Boniface of Canossa, in the abbey church at Pomposa; many years later, Boniface was remembered for the annual visits to the abbey where, it was said, he would lament his sins and be washed clean by the prayers of the brothers. It is even claimed that Boniface, recalled by one modern historian as ‘monstrous and violent’, once stripped himself naked and submitted to a public whipping by the abbot of Pomposa as penance. Another story, from the same source, shows him admiring the demeanour of the choirboys in the monastery, who continually sang with their eyes cast down. Boniface arranged for a servant to climb to a high place in the abbey and then cast golden coins onto the stone flags of the presbytery. They landed there with a resounding din, but not one of the choirboys raised his eyes (13).

Guido of Arezzo may have been standing among the singers when the coins hit the floor. If so, this was only one of his many contacts with the Canossa. After his time at the abbey of Pomposa, which seems to have ended badly or at least in some kind of conflict with the abbot, Guido appears in the entourage of the bishop of Arezzo, although not among the inner and privileged circle of the canons. There is nothing coincidental about Guido’s new home, for the bishop whom he served was Theodaldus of Canossa (1023-36), the brother of Boniface whom Guido must have seen at Pomposa, whether the musician was present for the famous shower of coins or not. The family was clearly not prepared to let Guido go. Bishop Theodaldus and Boniface are both shown in a luxurious twelfth-century copy of the Vita Mathildis (Pl. 82). Guido’s precise reasons for leaving the abbey of Pomposa remain impossible to establish, but that may not matter very much since his change of community under a cloud can be paralleled in the lives of many eleventh-century monks; sharing a confined space with the same individuals, day after day, could create many kinds of tension that could be released only by exile. What seems certain, however, is that Guido’s move from Pomposa to Arezzo owed something to the continuing interest of a family that still remembered him as a gifted musician, and as a valued servant of Bishop Theodaldus, into the first decade of the twelfth century.

Now, for the second time, Guido found an able man to serve. Bishop Theodaldus of Arezzo ensured that good archives were kept, with the result that many of his charters survive, and he often appears elsewhere as a benefactor, notably in the charters of the new eremetical foundation of Camaldoli. Unlike some of his fellow prelates, Theodaldus noticed the forms of solitary Christian life that implicitly challenged the well-appointed existence of the bishops in their urban palaces; the charters show that he wished to further the cause of the reformed monastic life practised at Camaldoli, with an emphasis upon solitary prayer. Theodaldus was also an impressive preacher, for one of his sermons left a mark on Peter Damian, a severe critic; he was also a builder, completing the collegiate church of Saint Donatus that his predecessor had been unable to finish, ruling that the canons should celebrate the liturgy there from the feast of the consecration until Maundy Thursday, when they should join him in the episcopal Church of Saint Stephen. Guido of Arezzo, who must often have passed the building site, praises the result in his Micrologus for its ‘exceedingly marvellous plan’, and shows once again his satisfaction at being part of a distinguished community. He describes the canons as ‘outstandingly spiritual men, most plentifully fortified by the practice of the virtues and most abundantly distinguished by their pursuit of wisdom’. Since Guido is writing an open letter to Theodaldus here, we might expect him to praise the canons in this way, and it must be said that the surviving traces of learning and authorship from the circle around Theodaldus of Arezzo are somewhat thin apart from Guido’s own work. But in his Epistola ad Michahelem Guido praises Peter the Provost of the canons – perhaps with a certain reserve – for being a most learned man by the standards of our time’ (Pl. 83). After the debacle at Pomposa, whatever it may have been, Guido clearly thought that he had fallen on his feet. It is very characteristic of

this period, at least in the more dynamic areas of western Europe like the Po valley, that Guido’s experiments with methods of teaching and notating music should owe something to the clearance of lands, and the drainage of marshes, whence his masters derived much of their wealth and influence(14).

Among the five authentic works of Guido, two of his musical treatises describe a notational system that he emphatically presents as his own new solution to an old objective: to find a means of reducing a melody to a written record that singers can use to perform an unknown chant at sight, without the aid of a teacher. Viewing Guido’s system (or rather systems) today, and looking back through nearly a thousand years of the history of the stave, it is easy to forget that singers of the eleventh and twelfth centuries saw it as a bilingual method that integrated neumes and alphabetic letters, using the lines merely as a visual convenience to prolong the meaning of a letter across the page. The lines and spaces of Guido’s systems, and of all subsequent staves in mainstream practice, correspond to a musical scale whose degrees are assigned a letter of the alphabet, residually present in the various clefs that are still in use today, but much more actively present in many forms of Guido’s method. His point of departure was therefore an alphabetic method of recording pitch. In manuals of plainsong, and to some extent in systematic copies of chants, he and his pupils would sometimes have seen melodies written with letters used to indicate pitches in this way; such notations were known and used in Guido’s Italy, principally as a pedagogical tool, and he regarded them as infantile in the strict sense because they failed to communicate any nuances of phrasing or performance and demanded very little in the way of aural-to-visual sophistication. What musicians really needed to aid the process of learning, studying and emending their chants was a system that employed neumes to convey nuances of performance supported by letters that alphabetized the pitches and could therefore spell the melody in an unambiguous fashion. Guido accordingly placed a rack of letters on the left-hand side of the page, where writing began, so that each letter needed only to be written once and remained in force, prolonged across the page its own ‘rank’ or ordo. The next step was to mark these ranks or ordines to the eye with a line that could be traced in ink but did not have to be, for it might be ruled only in dry-point (with results that do not yield very well to photography). The great innovation of the system is that both the lines and the spaces between them mark a rank; this is what makes the new method fundamentally and crucially different from the string- notations found in earlier Carolingian treatises, where lines represent the chords of a musical instrument and the spaces between have no meaning. (Some of those who saw staff-notation for the first time may well have objected that it occupied too much space, and that it required excessive expenditure of money, in materials, and of time, in planning and executing the page.) Since one of the principal tasks facing any singer confronted with a new chant was to know where the semitone steps lay, Guido recommended that the two lines with a semitone step beneath them, for F and C, be ruled in red and yellow ink respectively. Now all that remained was for a scribe to place the neumes he already knew, in their standard or somewhat adapted form, in the appropriate ranks. In practice, therefore, the Guidonian stave was a bundle of graphic techniques that was continually being untied and reorganized as scribes experimented with them. Colourful enough it may sound from Guido’s own account, but later scribes were sometimes inclined to go further in guiding the eye, hence the use of green in many manuscripts to mark the lines without a clef (Pl. 84). (15)

Guido’s own account of his system is most suggestive precisely where it may now seem most opaque. As he lays out the principles of his notation, our own familiarity of the musical stave recedes and it becomes dimly possible to appreciate the character of the intellectual challenge it presented to its first users:

The notes are so arranged that each sound, however many times it may be repeated in the chant, is always to be found in its own, single rank (ordo); and so that you may better perceive these ranks, there are close-packed lines, and some ranks are assigned to these same lines and some to the space between the lines. Therefore, however many sounds there are on one line, or in one space, they all sound in the same way…(16)

If this seems curiously laboured, it is partly because Guido is clarifying these matters for novices, some of them only boys; but it is also because he is explaining his system to readers that had hitherto known musical notation, if they had known it at all, as a form of script. With his new method, notation had become a chart in the specialized sense of a graphic layout where symbols have place-value on the page. To read this chart, the viewer must interpret a relatively complex visual array that integrates verbal text, lines, spaces, alphabetic clef-letters, neumes and contrasting colours with an eye that needs to be guided at all times by a trained ear and an increasingly sophisticated symbol-to-sound perception.

Although Guido intended his notation for singers and not for philosophers, one should not miss the element of eleventh-century science that was involved in its making. In his lifetime, the Mediterranean symposium was just beginning that had recently seen some great men like Gerbert of Aurillac, and some lesser ones like Balther of Säckingen, travel to the libraries of Spain or southern Italy in search of texts on such matters as astronomy or medicine, many of them translated from Arabic and in their turn translated from the Greek. Peter Damian looked askance upon a certain Gualterus who had ‘so pursued learning around the borders of the Occident for nearly thirty years that he had entered not only the cities of the Germans and French but also those of the Spaniards and the Saracens’; he also cites the case of a certain Hugh of Parma, a man ‘of such ambition for learning in the arts’ that he ‘provided himself with an astrolabe of brilliant silver’ and became a chaplain of the emperor Conrad while he ‘panted after a bishopric’. By mid-century, and so perhaps at the time when Guido was in his last years, it becomes possible to pick up the traces of such careers with men like Alfanus, a gifted musician who was fluent in Greek, a renowned physician and a churchman of sufficient reputation and gravity to become archbishop of Salerno. (See Appendix to Chapter 19, under ‘Alfanus, archbishop of Salerno’.) Guido, for his part, claims to have met some ‘very acute philosophers’ whose search for musical learning had taken them to French masters, while others had studied with Germans. Some had even been to the Greeks. Reports of consultations with ‘Greeks’ form something of a topos in medieval music theory between the ninth century and the twelfth, but there is good reason to suppose that Guido’s remarks have substance to them. In 1005, the Byzantine recovery of Dyrrachium renewed an important line of communication between Italy and Byzantine Asia, while Arab conquests in the south drove many refugees from the Greek theme of Kalabria into central and northern Italy. Both in Pomposa and Arezzo, Guido’s range of contacts may have been broad, but his writings do not suggest that he was often troubled by the opposition, of considerable moment to Peter Damian, between the holy simplicity required of a monk and a sinful pride in learning. His time at Arezzo, where he dwelled as a monk among the canons serving a bishop, accords with many signs that studious but ascetic men in the eleventh century, with a commitment to the arts of measurement, were quite ready to serve a prelate. Their focus of interest might be the astrolabe, the abacus or the leading instrument of exact science, the musician’s monochord. (17)

The passage where Guido laboriously explains the workings of the stave has its closest parallels in contemporary treatises on the counting board or abacus, a relatively new subject for technical manuals in Guido’s lifetime. Indeed, the background to Guido’s work as the ‘inventor’ of the musical stave does not just lie with the work of the choir school; it also touches the intellectual interests represented, at their highest level, by Gerbert of Aurillac (c.950-1003) and by many other lesser figures who studied the abacus, monochord or astrolabe and wrote treatises upon them with parvuli or ‘small boys’ in mind, as Guido did. With the aid of these instruments the study of the numerical subjects among the seven liberal arts might open outwards to experiments, the experimenta mentioned in this context by Bernold of Constance during the last decade of the eleventh century.

The treatises on the abacus are especially suggestive for they show the same scrupulous attention to place-value as the stave. Just as Guido emphasizes the virtue of a perfect placing of the neumes’, so the abacus manuals identify the true skill of the abacista as a mastery of ‘placements, that is to say locations’: the art of putting figured counters in the right columns using the rules governing numbers to base 10. They also show the same commitment to lay matters out as clearly as possible, to ducere oculum or ‘lead the eye’, which is the heart of Guido’s system with its colour-coded lines creating what is in effect a graph with pitch on the x-axis and the sequence of time on the y-axis. Above all, the abacus manuals also provide a context for Guido’s use of significant spaces in his notation. The concept of a meaningful space, essential to the workings of Guido’s stave, has one of its closest parallels in the columns of the abacus and in what one of Guido’s Italian contemporaries, Laurence of Amalfi, calls their lineale spatium vacuum, their ‘extended empty space’. So perhaps it should be no surprise that the closest parallel to an imperious eleventh-century drawing of Guido seated at his monochord may be a sketch of his younger contemporary, Pandulf of Capua, with his board abacus and its counters marked with early Occidental forms of Hindu-Arabic numerals. Both images show Italians who had mastered two of the eleventh century’s principle instruments for rigorous enquiry and formal demonstration. (18)

The Roman Journey

It is very characteristic of the Guido story that his invention was approved by an exalted churchman, Pope John XIX, whom Guido would probably have wished to reproach, had it not been so obviously in his interests to remain silent. The account of this meeting appears in his Epistola ad Michahelem, the letter to a monk of Pomposa that mentions Guido’s long struggle to champion his methods of notating and reforming the melodies of plainsong. The letter also reveals how Guido eventually triumphed over his opponents when Pope John XIX invited him to Rome, having heard the renown (or so Guido claims) of the song-school at Arezzo. During the meeting that eventually took place, presumably somewhere in the papal apartments in the Lateran palace, the pope inspected Guido’s antiphoner with his own hands: (19)

John, of the highest apostolic seat, who now governs the Roman church, hearing the fame of our school and greatly marvelling how, by means of our antiphoner, boys might learn chants they had never heard, invited me with three emissaries. I therefore went to Rome with Grimaldus, the most reverend Abbot, and Peter, Provost of the canons of the Church of Arezzo, the most learned man of our times. The pope, very delighted by my arrival, speaking of many things and asking much, frequently turning the pages of our antiphoner as if it were a marvel and studying the prefatory rules, did not leave that place or move from where he sat until he had learned one versicle he had never heard, fulfilling his wish, so that he might as soon as possible discover in himself what he scarcely believed in others.

This encounter filled Guido with a quite justifiable pride, for how often did a messenger bring a document to the papal court and find himself rewarded with the sight of the pope handling the material himself? Once John XIX had studied the ‘prefatory rules’ he was even able to sing a versicle from Guido’s antiphoner, relying entirely upon the resources of the notation he found there because it was one he had never heard. (These rules survive as a separate treatise by Guido, the Prologus in Antiphonarium.) As a result of this interview, Pope John formed such a high estimation of both Guido and his methods – again according to Guido – that he invited him to remain in Rome and teach the Roman clergy. If this story is true, and there is no real reason to doubt the essentials, then it is a tale of persistence rewarded. Nonetheless, Guido sounds a pessimistic note here and there in the letter. The workings of the Divine Will are obscure, he declares, which explains (for evidently nothing else can) his struggle to prevail. For many years, the truth he wished to impart had been ‘trampled by deceit’, the charity that he should have received ‘crushed by spite’. He has at last emerged from this battle with his detractors and enemies, but only as a weary and embittered campaigner who has learned that the life of monks is almost always characterized by envy or invidia. Hence the Epistola ad Michahelem is neither a dedicatory epistle marked by flattery nor a piece of theological polemic, even though Guido knew how to write letters of both kinds. It mostly praises Guido himself. Hence Pope John is ‘very delighted’ by Guido’s arrival and regards the new antiphoner as a ‘marvel’. The abbot of Pomposa, formerly one of his detractors, is also named in the Epistola, but only because Guido sought him out, well aware that the approval he had received from Pope John left his venerable opponent in a weak position. In effect, Guido went to demand an apology from the abbot, or at least an expression of regret, and he received it. Not many choirmasters of the eleventh century had the chance to wring such an admission from the spiritual counsellor to a Holy Roman Emperor.

Pope John XIX came from the Roman family of the Tusculani, and if the Holy Roman emperors had one clear priority in their reforms of the church in Guido’s later years, and beyond, it was to extricate the papacy from that clan and from its rivals. Guido’s deference may have been somewhat forced during his interview with Pope John, for the pontiff had inherited the papal throne from his brother, laying him open to a form of the charge that Guido levelled against Heribert of Milan in the Epistola Widonis, namely that John XIX had obtained the office through simony. Guido is unlikely to have exonerated John from this condemnation, and indeed he left Rome soon after the interview, having declined or postponed the pontiff’s offer to teach the singers of the papal chapel because “nearly all” the bishops could be charged with the heresy of simony. Yet in retrospect, the summons to Rome that Guido received does John credit, for it looks like one of the first green shoots of eleventh-century reform to have emerged from Rome itself, and it grew within the circle of a pope who has long been disparaged. The encouragement John XIX offered to Guido is one of the most positive things recorded of that prelate and an important element in the reassessment of his pontificate. (20)

Guido claims that he was summoned to Rome by the pope, but the truth may be somewhat more complex in a way that opens a curious chapter in Guido’s story. It may place him at the opposite end of Latin Europe, training singers in the diocese of Hamburg-Bremen. The eleventh-century chronicler of that see, Adam of Bremen, reports that Archbishop Hermannus (1032-5) “brought to Bremen the music-master Guido, at whose instance he corrected the chant and the life of the cloister”. Of all the archbishop’s efforts, “this was the only one that was successful”. This evokes the practice, well attested in the Carolingian Church and revived in the eleventh century, of associating a reform of chant very closely with a reorganization of the common life of monks or canons concerned, and especially with a life that required continence, regular attendance at night offices and continual residence in a common cloister. Indeed, the association between ‘corrected’ chant and a reformed manner of life could scarcely be closer than it is in Adam of Bremen’s remark that Hermannus ‘corrected the chant and the life of the cloister’. Many have been inclined to deny that the Guido in question here is Guido of Arezzo, or that a sojourn in distant Bremen may lie behind Guido’s reference to his ‘exile in a distant land’ in the Epistola ad Michahelem, but the dates present little difficulty. The Epistola is commonly assigned to 1030-2, which coincides with the reign of the archbishop who invited a music master named Guido to Hamburg-Bremen (1032-5), and accords with the proposal that the archbishop summoned Guido at the beginning of his episcopate in 1032, and that Guido wrote to Michael soon afterwards, mentioning his ‘exile’.(21)

There is also a possible link between Guido and Bremen in the person of Knút (popularly known as Canute), the king of Demark, Norway and England (d. 1035), and his queen, Emma. Knút and Emma were of great interest to Adam of Bremen because the queen was a notable benefactress of the church there; Adam praises her warmly as ‘the most devout Emma, who loved the Church at Bremen exceedingly. The importance of this connection is that Knút can be placed in the milieu of Pope John XIX, who so famously approved Guido’s antiphoner. Knút was an especially honoured guest at Rome in 1027 when the emperor Conrad received the imperial title of Augustus from John XIX, an event that also brought Guido’s master Theodaldus and some members of the Arezzo chapter to Rome. This is revealed by a charter dated 31 March 1027, wherein Conrad renews some of the canon’s possessions and privileges. Peter the Provost of Arezzo, one of the men whom Guido says accompanied him to meet John XIX, is named in this charter, as one would expect. Hence there may be some merit in reviving the old proposal that this was the time, 1027, during the months of the imperial consecration in Rome, when Guido journeyed to that city and had his interview with John XIX. (It may not count for much that Guido says nothing of the imperial consecration, nor of the great confluence of clergy that accompanied it, in his account of his Roman visit; Guido is everywhere the hero of his own story.) The great synod of bishops and abbots which followed the acclamation of the emperor was certainly attended by Guido’s namesake and former master, Guido of Pomposa, and our musician’s presence in Rome at this time would explain how he was able to be in the Eternal City to meet John XIX and then appear in the residence of abbot Guido ‘after only a few days’, which does not sound like an interval sufficient for the journey from Rome to distant Pomposa in the Po valley. The experience of conversing with a great many visiting bishops, or at least of conversing about them, may lie behind Guido’s otherwise unaccountably broad generalization that ‘nearly all the bishops are infected with the heresy of Simony’. It is at least possible that Pope John spoke of Guido’s innovations to his honoured guest Knút, or to his advisers, when they were in Rome for the ceremonies of 1027, and that this is why a choirmaster named Guido appears a few years later, so far from home, in the temporary service of a church at Bremen with which Knút and his queen, Emma, had a close connection.(22)

Guido’s Collected Edition

At some stage in his life, perhaps relatively late, Guido may have issued his musical writings as a set. They present a field of musical study but also form a narrative (if that is not too strong a word) recounting a monk’s labour to create something of moment to the singers of the Universal Church. To be sure, Guido cannot be compared in this regard with his contemporary Otloh of St Emmeram (d. c.1070), whose account of his own writings, and indeed of his spiritual drama, come as close to an autobiography in the modern sense as one has any right to expect from an eleventh-century author, but by the standards of any age Guido was a writer much concerned with his name, his reputation and the circumstances in which they had been variously abased or exalted. By general agreement, his four authentic musical treatises are the Micrologus, the Regulae rhythmicae, the Prologus in antiphonarium and the Epistola ad Michahelem. They are preserved, whole or in part, in at least seventy manuscripts ranging from the eleventh century to the sixteenth and beyond, an impressive total that spans much of Latin Christendom, though most of the sources derive from the kingdom of France or Imperial territory (essentially Germany and northern or central Italy) with a respectable showing from England. In the majority of the manuscripts, from all periods, the scribes copied all four of Guido’s musical works, and in many sources the four treatises are placed back to back, thus strengthening the impression of a set. What is more, the four books very often appear in the same order, which is Micrologus, Regulae, Prologus and Epistola, or abbreviated MRPE. Even in the earliest layer of manuscripts, cautiously dated to the eleventh or twelfth century today, the MRPE order can be discerned, complete or in modules, amidst a scattering of other materials.

Time and time again, scribes seem to have received Guido’s four books in this canonical order. Very occasionally, the scribes register that sense in explicit terms, at least in some of the later sources. A London manuscript of the fourteenth century (L04, from France) prefaces the Regule with the words ‘Here begins the second book of the same Guido’. One source of the thirteenth century (V4, from south Germany or Austria) says considerably more, showing that the scribe had pondered the order of Guido’s works and discerned some significance in it. The Micrologus and Regule pass by with plain or explanatory rubrics of the usual kind, but the Prologus is announced as ‘[Guido’s] third book’ and the Epistola, the letter to Michael of Pomposa, is called ‘An epistolary recapitulation of all the work of the same Guido, [addressed] to a monk’.(23)

It will never be known whether this represents Guido’s own understanding of the Epistola, but since the MRPE order is so deeply rooted in the manuscript tradition of his works there is a chance that the order is Guido’s own. It may result from a conscious process of editing his musical works, composed at different times, at some later stage when they were all complete. The order may be chronological (none of Guido’s works can be precisely dated) and for what it may be worth, the MRPE order is not so very distant from the sequence MPRE, widely accepted as the one in which Guido wrote them. But might the order be more potent than chronology, as the note in the Vienna manuscript suggests, referring to the epistolary recapitulation’ of the last book in the set? There does seem to be a persistent concern when the treatises are read in this sequence, and it is essentially a graded course in staff-notation and a vindication of the method. The set begins with the Micrologus, or more precisely with the acrostic at the beginning of that work, which reveals Guido’s name, followed by the prefatory letter that places him as the valued servant of Bishop Theodaldus of Arezzo. This was the book that some medieval commentators were disposed to treat as a free-standing text for detailed commentary, for the chapters of the Micrologus form a remarkably comprehensive manual, given the overall size of the book, and one that is well able to stand on its own. Guido does not appear to have used his staff-notation in this treatise, presumably because that notation is a bilingual system that relies upon a novice’s acquaintance with the monochord letters and with basic musical structures, which it is the purpose of the Micrologus, among many other things, to teach. Guido alludes to this in the next treatise of the sequence, the Regule, by saying ‘we have proved notation letters to be the best’ then proceeding to introduce the reader to staff-notation. At the end of the Regule, Guido alludes to an antiphoner he has made, which we are clearly to understand was copied in some form of his staff-notation throughout. This prepares the reader for the third treatise of the set, which is the prologue to that antiphoner, and for the fourth, the Epistola, which describes how John XIX read that prologue when he examined the antiphoner in Rome and commended it, together with its new notational system. Hence the last of the four books gives a circumstantial account of Guido’s vindication, and Guido is ready to close the set of treatises by referring the reader back to all his works, as he does at the end of the last of the four, the Epistola (380-8). He is also ready to borrow valedictory words from the Apostle: “I have fought the good fight, I have finished the race, I have kept the faith. As for the rest, a crown of justice awaits me.” (24)

No matter how colourful it may appear with its lines of red and yellow, Guido’s stave was the work of an essentially ascetic mind. As mentioned above, the Canossa clan remembered him as heremita beandus, ‘the blessed hermit’. The description suggests that Guido ended his days in monastic seclusion; he says himself that he had always desired a measure of vita solitaria. His notation is designed to secure uniformity in liturgical performance: the conformity of the individual to the common rule. In that regard he did more than provide some important resources for a reorganization of the common life, symbolized by the unanimity of voices in choir. He also promoted the commitment to peace through uniformity of cultic observance that is one of the most ancient streams of Catholic thought about the conduct of the common life. There is a kind of associative thinking here, quite alien to modern categories such as “the Church”, or “politics”, making it ultimately impossible to draw any clear distinction between what we might be inclined to call (using phrases from the Epistola Widonis) ‘physical corruption’, ‘the corruption of heresy’ and the ‘disorder’ that can occur in monasteries, cathedral churches and the wider world of king and nobles. It was one part of Guido’s work to bring the materials at the heart of choral worship into a sharper focus and impose an order upon them. His notation presents every chant in such a way that there is no longer a need for contention or an excuse for caprice, and he emphasizes that his system will allow the true Roman chant of Pope Gregory the Great to be recorded and transmitted in an accurate and canonical form. From now on, singers will know that they have the true tradition, the musical counterpart of the doctrinal tradition at the heart of Catholicism, because they are singing from the antiphoner of Gregory, not the book of some ‘Leo or Albert’. (He was not troubled by the fact that his antiphoner was the work ‘some Guido’, although that is very likely to have been one of the criticisms levelled at him in Pomposa.) No reader of Guido can mistake his dogmatic and combative tone, evident in all his five writings, or long remain in doubt that there is an implicit association in his work between the lines of his stave and several senses of the potent notion of a rule, Latin regula, whose meanings included a ruler for drawing lines’, ‘a norm for behaviour’ and ‘a form of the common life for monks or canons’. Perhaps the association goes deeper still, associating the monks and clergy who attend vigils ‘with purity’, unpolluted by simony or sexual contact, with the purity of corrected chant recorded in a new notation that Guido disingenuously compares to glass: pure and transparent to its object. (25)