Benedictine Monk Invented Musical Notation

A dear friend of mine gave this homily many years back:

Before the year 1000, music was not written in such a way that a person who had never heard the melody could sing or play it. The church music of this time was simply traditional. Remember it was before the printing press. The singing in church on Sundays was poor, although they did indeed sing. In Monasteries, music was taken more seriously, but still there was no known way to write it out so that even if a person had never heard the melody before it would still be possible to sing it accurately.

In Monasteries, they used huge books with the Latin text written in enormous letters. If the note was supposed to go up, there was a little mark like an apostrophe made over the word. If it was to stay the same, a little straight mark went over the word. If it was to go down, a little downward mark was made. As you can see, it was not very useful.

In the little town of Arezzo in Italy there was a musician, a monk at the Benedictine abbey there, who particularly wanted to find a way to write music effectively. He prayed a lot about it. In about the year 1000 on the 23rd of June he was preparing the music for the feast of the Birth of John the Baptist. In the first Vespers, that is, the evening prayer on the eve of the feast day, he noticed that the Vesper Hymn called in Latin "Ut queant laxis", attributed to Paul the Deacon in the 8th century, had a traditional melody in which the first syllables of each of the half lines of the poem which comprises the hymn was one full tone higher than the one preceding it.

Here I will indicate the Latin words of this beautiful ancient hymn:

Ut queant laxis
resonare fibris Mira gestorum
famuli tuorum,
solve polluti
labii reatum, Sancte Ioannes. Nuntius celso veniens Olympo,
Te patri magnum fore nasciturum

The musician's name was Guy and history has called him Guy of Arezzo. He pondered this phenomenon and drew out four lines like this:

On each of these lines and spaces he wrote the first two or three letters of the Latin word and of course came up with: Ut, Re, Me, Fa, Sol, La, Ti. Of course, the Ut was repeated at the end. The Ut was later changed to Do. Thus we have Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Ti, Do.

The remarkable feature of this story is that the Hymn was a prayer to God that He would grant us a better way to sing to His glory. In other words, the Hymn was like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Here is the first verse of this wonderfully beautiful Hymn:

Oh for thy spirit, Holy John, to chasten
Lips sin-polluted, fettered tongues to loosen
So by thy children might thy deeds of wonder
Meetly be chanted.

In this time of revisionist history, I submit this story which is true and which I learned many years ago. All music written in the world today uses this method of notation. It was given to us by a God-fearing Christian wanting to better sing the praises of the Creator. Christians have given so much to this world to make it more beautiful. We should be very proud and happy indeed!

Sincerely in Christ,

Rev. Pat Fee