Cowden Hall’s Cornerstone Verse: Colossians 3:16
Artistic Theologian
Volume 12
Coming Summer 2025
Editor: Joshua A. Waggener
The names etched in the outer walls of Cowden Hall represent major contributions to music development throughout history. Of the thirty-one names listed, Guido d’Arezzo (ca. 991–92–after 1033), a Benedictine monk who served in the cathedral of Arezzo, Italy, is the only one considered to be a music theorist. There have been numerous religious figures who theorized about music, such as Augustine of Hippo (354–430), Hucbald (ca. 840/850–930), Gioseffo Zarlino (1517–1590), and Johannes Lippius (1585–1612). What makes Guido so special to be listed among the names surrounding Cowden Hall? Besides his obvious religious connection to the church at Arezzo, Guido was unique among theorists in his approach of using music theory for practical, pedagogical purposes for church worship. Also noteworthy is that his most famous work, Micrologus, was written precisely one thousand years ago, in 1025–1026.
Music theory as a discipline is foundational to understanding the language of music. It not only helps one comprehend the structural elements of music but also prepares one to craft and create within the language. Just as seminary students need to learn Greek and Hebrew to study the original languages of the biblical texts, so too church musicians need to learn the language of music through music theory to better understand how music can be utilized for ministry.
In addition to training students to be biblically faithful and ministry minded, the Southwestern School of Church Music and Worship also trains students to be musically excellent. This involves more than refining the musician’s voice or fingers to be a professional practitioner. It also involves understanding the development of music, both in its history as a language (music theory) and its composition and presentation in the church and concert hall (music history). These aspects of music education enlighten students about sacred and secular music of the twenty-first century, from both a mechanical and structural level, which aid in their work as a worship leader in the church. Music theory in particular is practical for today’s worship leader in regard to sight-singing, ear-training, and music reading. Fascinatingly, these same practical musical skills were important pedagogical goals for church practitioners one thousand years ago, as evidenced in the writings of Guido.
Guido’s Writings
While many details of Guido’s life are unknown, his writings shed some light on his musical career. Guido was born in the early 990s and was educated in the Benedictine abbey of Pomposa near Ferrara, Italy. While training singers in Pomposa, Guido developed methods for effectively teaching new chants in a short time. While his innovations were praised throughout parts of Italy, the fellow brothers in Pomposa disdained them. Guido eventually moved to Arezzo in 1025, where he served under the Bishop of Arezzo to train singers for the city’s cathedral. He continued to develop innovative methods for sight-singing and staff notation, which led to an invitation by Pope John XIX to visit Rome and present his musical ideas. Unfortunately, poor health forced him to leave Rome after a short time, and he eventually settled in a monastery near Arezzo. He is presumed to have died around after 1033.
Four writings are attributed to Guido, all written between 1025 and 1032. In his first work, Micrologus, Guido outlines the singing and teaching practices of Gregorian chant. The Regule rithmice and Prologus in Antiphonarium also provide significant contributions in their important discussions of music notation. Additionally, the Epistola ad Michahelem introduces the use of solmization (a system that uses syllables to represent the notes of a musical scale) to aid in learning new chants, which eventually became the solfege system still used today. Guido’s contribution to the advancement of music theory and music notation are significant, and his name is often used in conjunction with several key musical inventions. As Robert Wason states, “Three brilliant pedagogical ideas have traditionally been attributed to Guido, earning him his honored place in the history of music pedagogy: staff notation, the system of hexachords, and his ‘classroom visual aid’ for sight-singing [performance], the ‘Guidonian Hand.’”1
While Guido is associated with these major advancements in music theory, we cannot be certain that his contributions were his own inventions. For instance, while the Micrologus demonstrates an abstraction of the hexachord (a six-note scalar pattern in music), it does not actually mention the term. Also, the visual representation of a “hand” is absent in all his writings. Dolores Pesce, in her monumental monograph that critically examines and translates Guido’s three later works, provides a possible reason why Guido is credited with these inventions, despite their absence in his writings. As she notes, “Guido is popularly known for his invention of staff notation and of the do re mi system for learning new songs. Careful examination of Guido’s texts suggests that the precise degree of his contributions in these areas cannot be definitively established, although his essential role is unquestionable.”2 She also states that “the ‘Guidonian Hand’—a pictorial representation of the gamut with letters and syllables placed on joints of the hand—cannot be attributed to Guido. But just as was the case for solmization, the hand was almost certainly inspired by Guido’s writings.”3 As Pesce asserts, Guido’s influence was significant in the development of these musical inventions, which is why his name is often attributed to them.
Anna Reisenweaver, in her article discussing Guido’s influence on music learning, provides a more constructive perspective on the lack of evidence to suggest the origin of his contributions: “Despite the controversies that may surround Guido’s work, it is certain that his primary desire and goal in developing his methods was to aid students in the learning of chant. This objective was unique in his time, as previous theorists, such as Boethius, chose to focus their writings on the philosophical and mathematical implications of music rather than on the education of their readers.”4 In Guido’s case, the readers of his writings were music practitioners in the church. The education he wished to provide addressed both the philosophy and practical principles of music, which to him were essential for the work of church musicians.
Guido’s observation from his Regule rithmice highlights his priority in educating church music practitioners:
Musicorum et cantorum, magna est distantia
Isti dicunt, ili sciunt, quae componit musica.
Nam qui facit quod non sapit, diffinitur bestia.
Great is the gap between musicians and singers;
The latter talk about what music comprises, while the former under
stand these things.
For he who does what he does not understand is termed a beast.5
Prior to Guido’s time, someone who studied and understood the principles of music was called a musicus. This person was different than an ecclesiastical singer/performer called a cantor, someone who knew how to perform music but did not necessarily know how music functioned and operated. However, Pesce states that by the end of the ninth century:
… the distinction blurred as the inquiries of the musicus were applied to the repertory of the cantor—the sacred songs of the Church. A hybrid character, the musicus-cantor, evolved among the clergy; he was a learned practitioner, and thus acceptable. But if one remained the “unknowing” cantor, the mere practitioner, then the same derision applied to a singer in Boethius’ time was appropriate here, as Guido makes clear in the Regule.6
The “unknowing” singer remained a “beast.”
In the introduction to his Micrologus, a work written as an Epistle to Bishop Theodaldus, Guido clearly articulates his desire to make the complex writings of previous music philosophers more accessible to music practitioners in order to bridge the gap between musicus and cantor:
I offer to your most sagacious and fatherly self [Bishop Theodaldus] the precepts of the science of music, explained, so far as I could, much more clearly and briefly than has been done by philosophers, neither in the same way, for the most part, nor following in the same tracks, but endeavoring only that it should help both the cause of the church and our little ones. The reason that this study has remained obscure up to now is that, being truly difficult, it has been explained in simpler terms by no one.7
Guido’s goal was specifically to train choir boys in his parish to be able to understand the principles behind the music they were singing and to apply those principles to learning new songs. To that end, he wrote in simpler terms than previous music theorists, which aided in a better understanding of the concepts previously only known to learned philosophers. In addition to the simpler writing style, Guido’s manuscripts also offered fresh perspectives on the nature of music and its notation. His discussions on octave equivalence, the hexachord and solmization, and staff notation provided new and revolutionary ideas that changed the way music was conceived and produced—ideas that are still used in music theory pedagogy today.
Octave Equivalence
One of Guido’s verifiable contributions to music theory was his explanation and use of octave equivalence. Earlier Greek music theorists utilized the tetrachord to explain periodicity at the fifth interval. These ideas were later outlined in the ninth century Latin treatises Musica enchiriadis and Scolica enchiriadis (the commentary on Musica). The tetrachord was a stepwise group of four pitches with the interval pattern tone–semitone–tone (referred hereafter as T-S-T). This foundational scalar pattern was then repeated at the interval of a fifth, eventually creating the full gamut of eighteen pitches used in chant writing. Example 1 shows a modern transcription of the gamut with Daseian notation (the notation used in the enchiriadis treatises), above the modern staff.
Example 1. The Enchiriadis Scale System and Daseian Notation (I = Protus, II = Deuterus, III = Traits, IV = Tetrardus) from Cohen, “Notes, Scales, and Modes,” 3248
The issue with this way of creating the gamut was that as notes moved beyond the first two tetrachords, certain notes in the scale needed to be altered from one octave to another to continue the T-S-T pattern consistently. These alterations in the gamut show a downplaying of the octave in favor of the fifth interval of periodicity, a point which Calvin Bower articulates:
The most obvious peculiarity of the enchiriadis pitch collection lies in the fact that this text seems oblivious to the lack of periodicity at the octave (and double octave),…. While the duple ratio of the octave lies as a first principle in Pythagorean theorizing, in the enchiriadis tradition it is brought into consideration only to describe the miraculous mutation that occurs in a pitch collection in which the octave is rather insignificant except when singing polyphony.9
Unlike the Greek music theorists who divided the scale into tetrachords, the Italian theorists such as Guido pointed out divisions in octave segments and stressed octave equivalence based on recurring interval patterns from notes eight steps apart. Chapter 5 of Guido’s Micrologus presents his version of octave equivalence.10 As Guido observes of the octave (diapason) interval,
Its property is to have the same letter on both ends, as from B to b, from C to c, from D to d, and so forth. Just as both sounds are notated by the same letter, so both are held and believed to be in all respects of the same nature and the most absolute likeness. Just as when seven days have elapsed we repeat the same ones, so that we always name the first and eighth the same; so we always represent and name the first and eighth notes the same way, because we perceive that they sound together with a natural concord.11
He presented this to show the difference with the notation in the enchiriadis treatises that used repeated musical symbols for notes a fifth apart instead of the octave. However, the octave interval is where true tone equivalence is found in nature based on the overtone series, and Guido recognized this.12
In conjunction with octave equivalence, Guido discussed the principle of qualities, or affinitas (affinities), of notes based on intervallic patterns surrounding each note. Stefano Mengozzi explains that, “Using modern terminology, we may define affinitas as the similarity of diatonic position between any two sounds of the gamut. Guido would speak of similarity of … the interval pattern adjacent to two pitches a fifth away from each other.”13 Guido referred to these affinities as modi vocum or “modes of notes.” As David Cohen writes,
In his discussion of these matters, Guido first emphasizes that, because octave equivalence reduces the number of truly distinct notes to seven (A-G), there can at most be only seven note-qualities. In fact, it turns out, there are only four: three pairs of notes (A/D, B/E, C/F) share the same quality due to their having the same modus vocum, and thus have “affinity” with each other, while the seventh note (G) stands alone, with its own quality and modus vocum, without affinity to any other note.14
The point of Guido’s discussion of modal affinities was to show the similar interval patterns between notes in order to help recognize and learn melodic patterns in the chants the choir boys were learning. This was a practical purpose for a previously philosophical idea of the nature of sound.
Hexachord and Solmization
Another significant contribution to music theory was Guido’s explanation of the hexachord and its use in developing solmization, a mnemonic system that attributes syllables to each note of a musical scale. As the chart of the modal “affinities” showed, certain segments of adjacent pitches shared similar interval patterns. The enchiriadis treatise utilized the T-S-T interval pattern, but Guido took that pattern one step further in demonstrating similarity beyond the tetrachordal segments. Guido’s six-note segment consisted of the enchiriadis T-S-T tetrachord with a whole tone on either side. The symmetrical pattern of the hexachord T-T-S-T-T made it relatively easy to situate it in the gamut, surrounding the semitone in the middle. Guido observed that the same intervallic pattern of the scale segment was repeated at the perfect fourth and the fifth (starting from C), as shown in Example 2. As Cohen notes, “It was Guido, indeed, who discovered the two intra-octave segments of the diatonic scale (G-E and C-A) with the longest identical series of intervals (T-T-S-T-T), and applied this discovery both to the elementary pedagogy of sight singing and to the explanation of recurrent (modal) qualities (‘affinities’) among certain sets of fourth- and fifth-related notes.”15
Example 2. The Guidonian Gamut and Hexachords – from Cohen, “Notes, Scales, and Modes,” 342.
The six recurring Latin syllables that are shown in Example 2 are attributed to Guido; these eventually became the syllables (with slight modification) used in solfege solmization: ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la.16 These six syllables come from the hymn “Ut queant laxis,” which Guido presents in his Epistola ad Michahelem, seen in Example 3. As Guido observes, each of the six phrases in the hymn tune begin on a different note of the hexachord, in ascending order with each phrase. The opening syllable for each phrase was used as the solmization syllable. Guido explains that “if someone … knows the beginning of every phrase so that he can without hesitation immediately begin any phrase he chooses, he will easily be able to sing the same six pitches according to their properties wherever they appear.”17 In other words, knowing to which hexachord a pitch is assigned and its placement in the hexachord will automatically provide the knowledge of the surrounding interval patterns in the melody line.
Example 3. The Hymn “Ut Queant Laxis” from Epistola ad Michahelem, trans. Pesce, 466
Guido goes on to underscore that this method of recognizing interval patterns in the music will help singers quickly learn new chants: “Thus, in order that you may competently sing unheard chants as soon as you see them written down, or, hearing unwritten chants, you can immediately set them down in writing well, this method will assist you most advantageously.”18 Another innovation, the “Guidonian hand,” became a visual tool to identify each note in the gamut, based on which solmization syllables were available for each pitch. This, however, was not presented in Guido’s writings.
While the system of solmization provided the syllables that later became foundational for the solfege system, Guido himself did not make clear his intentions for practical use of the syllables. Regarding the application of the syllables for the purposes of sightsinging, Pesce observes, “It is noteworthy that Guido does not describe exactly this process, and scholars have expressed doubts about whether he actually intended that a singer should utter the syllable ut re mi, etc. when singing a new song.”19 However, Guido was well aware of the similar intervallic relationships between hexachords and his aim was to provide practical methods for church singers to understand these relationships for singing accurately and learning melodic lines quickly.
Staff Notation
A third significant contribution to music theory was Guido’s simple but revolutionary adjustment to staff notation. As previously mentioned, the enchiriadis treatises of Guido’s time used Daseian notation. This type of notation utilized a varying number of lines, sometimes as many as eighteen, with each line representing a pitch. In addition, four different shapes were placed at the far left end of the staff lines to help denote specific pitches. These shapes were rotated as a way to delineate which tetrachord the pitch was found in and denote the full gamut of pitches.20
Guido discusses the use of staff notation in both the Regule and Prologus. Guido’s issue was that the antiphons—short chants used in church liturgy—were not being consistently sung from one church to the next due to inadequate notation. What Guido hoped to achieve with his staff notation was uniformity in performance of the antiphons. As Guido states, “For, in such a way, with the help of God I have determined to notate this antiphoner, so that hereafter through it, any intelligent and diligent person can learn a chant, and after he has learned well part of it through a teacher, he recognizes the rest unhesitatingly by himself without a teacher.”21 The previous method of notation was to utilize only the lines of the staff to designate pitch, which was similar to strings on an instrument. Guido’s method of notation was to utilize the lines as well as the spaces between the lines to represent pitch, something that had not been previously done. He provides the most detailed description of his notation system in Prologus: “Therefore, pitches are so arranged that each sound, howsoever much it is repeated in a chant, is always found in one and the same row. In order that you can better distinguish these rows, lines are drawn closely, and they make some rows of pitches on the lines themselves, some between the lines, that is, in the space between the lines.”22 Guido illustrates both versions of notation in the Regule, as shown in Example 4.
Example 4. Guido’s Example of Previous Melodic Notation Versus His Use of Spaces and Lives, from Regule Rithmice, Trans. Pesce, 374-76.
In addition to using the spaces between the lines to represent pitch, Guido also suggested that certain letters be placed to the left of certain lines or spaces, referred to as clefs. To help further aid in music reading, he suggested that certain colors be used for specific lines to help denote those lines that have a semitone below them (specifically C and F). As Pesce notes, “The third point, adding colored lines to certain lines and spaces to signify the pitch classes F (red) and C (yellow), can most confidently be considered Guido’s unique contribution.”23 Guido’s notation system provided a clear and uniform way of writing antiphons, transmitting the melodic information to practitioners to easily identify and consistently sing the correct melodic line.24
Guido’s new style of notation was a major milestone in symbolizing pitch and changed the way music notation was perceived, not as a diagram of a stringed instrument, but as a musical language tool. Cohen provides a helpful summary of this new mode of thinking:
Medieval staff notation thus combines neumatic notation, used in practical sources for the transmission of repertoire, with the horizontal-line diagrams found in theoretical and didactic texts such as the Enchiriadis treatises, but with the crucial difference that now it is the spaces as well as the lines that signify notes. These diagrams, which trace their lineage back to Boethius, were … really iconic representations of instruments, in so far as the lines actually represent strings. The new idea of using the interlinear spaces, although it may well have been motivated by circumstantial factors such as the desire to save parchment, thus represents a crucial shift to a more purely symbolic mode of semiosis.25
As Guido shifted to a more pedagogical approach to music training, he utilized some of the ancient Greek philosophers’ tools but with different ends in mind. Specifically, Guido shifted away from considering the transcendent nature of song or music itself, which was the Platonic model, to a practical application of music notation for church performance. Guido’s shift in the use of staff notation for providing accurate and precise melodic lines had significant ramifications in that it allowed for (1) wide dissemination of antiphons without the need for intermediaries to teach these new works, and (2) the development of increasingly complex music to be accurately represented and preserved.
Conclusion
Guido’s contributions to music theory and pedagogy truly altered the way musicians thought about and wrote down compositions. He understood the need for practical application of the philosophical principles of music in order to educate church musicians. Reisenweaver summarizes the intertwining of Guido’s significant contributions to music learning:
With Guido’s notation system, singers could visualize the chant they were learning as the lines, clef signs, and colors indicated the exact pitch and size of the intervals they were to sing. Further, the notation, with its colors emphasizing the half-steps E-F and B-C, allowed the singer to determine the hexachord of the chant and how each pitch fit into that hexachord. Once the singer had determined the placement of each pitch, he could then affix the proper solmization syllables to each note, enabling him to sight-sing a previously unknown chant.27
As Bower states, “The subjects of music theory have become the character of liturgical chants …. Musica and cantus have been synthesized into music theory.”28 The effects of Guido’s contributions are still seen today, both in the music classroom and in the performance hall.
As the Southwestern School of Church Music and Worship prepares to celebrate 100 years of educating church musicians in Cowden Hall, music theory continues to help train church musicians. Core undergraduate classes at Texas Baptist College in music theory and musicianship (aural skills) provide students with: (1) a solid foundation in reading and understanding music notation systems used today, including traditional sheet music, lead sheets, chord charts, and Nashville number charts; (2) knowledge of a variety of musical forms and their impact on contemporary composition, which can aid in writing new music for the church; (3) a rich harmonic palette that can be used in reharmonizing tunes as well as providing interesting improvisations; (4) part-writing skills that benefit students who wish to write interesting and unique choral works for the church; and (5) well-trained ears to aurally recognize patterns in music and quickly learn new music. Graduate-level courses at Southwestern Seminary in music theory and improvisation for the worship leader build on foundational knowledge to further explore how the language of music has changed over time and the implications of such changes for worship leadership in the twenty-first century, focusing on creativity in writing and presenting music in today’s church. Doctoral seminars on music theory pedagogy aid professional students in understanding how to teach music theory in a way that promotes practical aspects of the field. In all levels of education, the discipline of music theory is vital to musical excellence for Christian musicians serving the church.
Guido’s goal in the eleventh century was to elevate the church practitioner beyond a mere performer to a well-studied and learned musician. This is still a worthy goal for church music pedagogues—including Southwestern professors teaching in Cowden Hall—one thousand years later.
- Robert W. Wason, “Musica practica: Music Theory as Pedagogy,” in The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, ed. Thomas Christensen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 48. ↩︎
- Dolores Pesce, Guido d’Arezzo’s Regule rithmice, Prologus in antiphonarium, and Epistola ad Michahelem: A Critical Text and Translation (Ottawa, Canada: The Institute of Mediaeval Music, 1999), 17. ↩︎
- Pesce, Guido, 20. ↩︎
- Anna J. Reisenweaver, “Guido of Arezzo and His Influence on Music Learning,” Musical Offerings 3, no. 1.4 (2012): 39. ↩︎
- Guido d’Arezzo, “Regule rithmice,” trans. Dolores Pesce in Pesce, Guido, 331. ↩︎
- Pesce, Guido, 331n4. ↩︎
- Guido d’Arezzo, “Micrologus,” trans. Warren Babb in Hucbald, Guido, and John on Music: Three Medieval Treatises, ed. Claude V. Palisca (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978), 58. ↩︎
- David E. Cohen, “Notes, Scales, and Modes in the Earlier Middle Ages,” in The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, ed. Thomas Christensen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 324. ↩︎
- Calvin M. Bower, “The Transmission of Ancient Music Theory into the Middle Ages,” in The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory, ed. Thomas Christensen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 155–56. ↩︎
- Guido arrives at the octave interval by joining the diatessaron interval (pitches A up to D) with the diapente interval (pitches D up to acute a). He labels the resulting interval the diapason (A up to acute a). ↩︎
- Guido, Micrologus, 61–62. ↩︎
- The overtone series consists of a fundamental pitch with resonating partial tones above the fundamental. The octave interval is the first partial above the fundamental tone with a ratio of 2:1. The octave interval is then repeated in multiples of two, at the 4:1 ratio, 8:1 ratio, 16:1 ratio, and so on. The principle of octave equivalence is realized in practice when telling a choir of men and women to sing in “unison,” knowing that they will sing the same pitch class (C, for instance) an octave apart. ↩︎
- Stefano Mengozzi, The Renaissance Reform of Medieval Music Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 30–31. ↩︎
- Cohen, “Notes, Scales, and Modes,” 348. ↩︎
- Cohen, “Notes, Scales, and Modes,” 350. ↩︎
- The original syllable ut was changed to do in the seventeenth century, a change that was proposed by Italian theorist G. B. Doni. See W. G. McNaught, “The History and Uses of the Sol-Fa Syllables,” Proceedings of the Musical Association 19, no. 1 (1892): 35–51. “The proposal arose out of the objection that was felt to the sound of Ut in vocal exercises. As a substitute, Doni, or his friends for him, proposed the first syllable of his name Do” (43). This change, along with the addition of si or ti for scale degree seven, has become the standard for solfege solmization syllables: do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti. ↩︎
- Guido d’Arezzo, “Epistola ad Michahelem,” trans. Dolores Pesce in Pesce, Guido, 469. ↩︎
- Guido, Epistola, 471. Reisenweaver further elaborates on and clarifies Guido’s method of solmization: “Under the solmization method, a singer would, upon receiving a new chant to learn, assign a syllable to each note based upon the particular hexachord to which that chant belonged. He would then know exactly which step in the hexachord each note matched and would be able to sight-sing the chant, taking time to correct intervals that were challenging or required mutation into a new hexachord.” Reisenweaver, Guido of Arezzo, 46. ↩︎
- Pesce, Guido, 19. ↩︎
- As seen before, Example 1 presents the full gamut of eighteen pitches in Daseian notation, with the four shapes rotated in each tetrachord. Because theorists prior to Guido utilized the enchiriadis tradition to create the gamut of pitches, they denoted pitches based on the tetrachord. The four shapes were each a different pitch within a single tetrachord. Each shape could be rotated to signify the same pitch placement in a different tetrachord of the gamut. ↩︎
- Guido d’Arezzo, “Prologus in antiphonarium,” trans. Dolores Pesce in Pesce, Guido, 415–17. ↩︎
- Guido, Prologus, 419. In his Regule, Guido provides a shortened but similar explanation of using spaces as well as lines for pitch notation, along with a musical example that utilizes spaces: “Hence, as one makes progress in one’s study, let one pitch be placed between two lines. Truly, reason demands that a diverse placement may arise in diverse things” (377). ↩︎
- Pesce, Guido, 18. ↩︎
- Interestingly, Guido’s earlier work Micrologus utilized both lines and spaces in staff notation, even though Guido did not formally discuss the new staff notation until his later writings. Chapter 11 presents a chant melody with the text below the staff and pitches assigned to both lines and spaces, with each line pitched a third apart and the C and F lines highlighted. ↩︎
- Cohen, “Notes, Scales, and Modes,” 346. ↩︎
