Inventor Of Modern Musical Notation: Guido D Arezzo

Inventor of Modern Musical Notation: Guido d’Arezzo

Musical notation is a form of writing or printing of musical notes, symbols and staves to visually represent aurally perceived music played with instruments or sung by the human voice. Various styles of music results in various different music notation methods too. For example, classical music performers use staves and note heads on sheet music, while country music musicians use Nashville Number System. Although many ancient cultures used symbols to represent melodies and rhythms, most of them were not understandable, this has limited our understanding of their music.

The earliest form of musical notation can be found in Nippur, Sumer (today’s Iraq) in about 2000 BC, it is in the form of a cuneiform tablet that shows pieces of instructions for performing music. Next,

Guido d’Arezzo (also known as Guido of Arezzo or Guido Aretinus) was born around 991/992 in Arezzo, Italy. He was an Italian music theorist of the Medieval Era. Guido was educated at the Benedictine abbey at Pomposa and was a Benedictine monk . He spent his earlier life at the monastery of Pomposa. While there, he noticed that singers had difficulty in remembering Gregorian chants (unaccompanied sacred song of the Roman Catholic Church). So he came up with a method for teaching the singers to learn chants in a short time, and quickly became famous throughout north Italy. Guido made use of the music treatise of Odo of Saint-Maur-des-Fosses and developed his principles of staff notation there. He was appointed by Theobald, bishop of Arezzo, as a teacher in the cathedral school in Arezzo and commissioned to write the Micrologus which became the second-most-widely distributed treatise on music in the Middle Ages. It contains Guido’s teaching method and it had attracted Pope John XIX, who invited Guido to Rome in around 1028. But he soon returned to Arezzo due to his poor