Home > Guido of Arezzo

Guido was a friar of the Benedictine order from the Italian city-state of Arezzo. He noted the difficulty that singers had in remembering Gregorian chants.

He developed new technologies for teaching, including the staff notation and the "do-re-mi" scale, in which the name of the single notes were taken from the initial syllables of the seven verses of a hymn, Ut queant laxis (at the beginning, "do" was called "ut").

The simple placement of lines allowed those reading musical notation to know where on the scale a particular note should be sung, moving from a relative scale (useful to those needing a reminder of where to sing) to an absolute scale .

1 See also

• SolfegeIn music and sight singing solfege is a way of assigning syllables to degrees or steps of the diatonic scale. In order, they are: Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Ti, and Do (for the octave). The origin of Solfege was a pedagogical technique created by Guido of A

2 External link

• On The Catholic Encyclopedia