Good Work, Guido!

 In the Divine Office, "there is first the this verse to be said three times: Domine labia mea aperies, et os meum annuntiabit laudem tuam". (Rule of St Benedict, chapter 9) This is a versicle that had been sung by hundreds of years before Guido d'Arrezo made it possible to be recorded on paper.

Illustration by Author

                 Learning and singing the antiphons and responses of the Divine Office was a full – time occupation in the Early Middle Ages. “As early as 838. Agobard of Lyons insisted that 'too many singers study from earliest youth until the hoariness of old age' to learn their chants; as a result they neglect readings and the study of divine eloquence'.”[1] The liturgical cantor played a crucial role in the monasteries of the Early Middle Ages. He was the only man in the monastery expected to know nearly every antiphon, hymn, sequence, and response for the entire liturgical year. Not only this, he was expected to teach all of this to others by rote repetition. It is easy to see how this heavy obligation would impede one’s vocation as a man of solitude and prayer.

                Being dependent on a cantor also meant the potential loss or distortion of liturgical music. One could not expect the legacy of plainchant to continue in its pristine condition in saecula saeculorum. Humans forget, they are inaccurate in their memorizations. It was with these concerns in mind that a single monk, Guido d’ Arezzo (d.1050 AD) set out to preserve the liturgical music in use for the Divine Office, and enable the cantors to live a pure monastic life.[2]

To this end, Guido devised a method of recording music upon paper by means of spatial organization. Each space and line corresponds to one of the seven possible musical pitches. This method for recording music is still employed in monasteries and parishes today. And Guido would have great satisfaction in knowing that today, more than one thousand years after his death, monastic cantors are able to employ themselves to the fullness of the monastic life, and that we are still singing the same antiphons and hymns that he did.

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[1] Christopher Page, “The West Finds Its Voice”, in History Today, June 2010, pg. 30

[2] Jeffery Tucker, “Guido the Great”, in Sacred Music, Fall 2007 Volume 134, Number 3.pg. 65