Guido of Arezzo
Guido of Arezzo or Guido Monaco (995-1050) is regarded as
the inventor of modern musical notation (staff
notation) that replaced neumatic notation.
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.
