Writing music down with neumes

The story

Songs learned by heart

In the monasteries and churches of the early Middle Ages people sang every day: psalms, prayers and hymns, in Latin, in a single voice, without instruments. That singing is now called Gregorian chant, after Pope Gregory the Great, because a tradition, probably a legend, said that a dove, the symbol of the Holy Spirit, had dictated it to him. In reality it took shape slowly over many centuries, mixing Roman and Frankish traditions.

For centuries nobody wrote the music down, not even the great choirmasters. Singers learned the melodies by listening and repeating them, and remembered hundreds by heart. A great scholar of the 7th century, Isidore of Seville, wrote that if sounds are not remembered by people, they are lost, because they cannot be written down. And in fact there was no way of doing it.

Signs above the words

Around the middle of the 9th century, in some monasteries in France and Switzerland, such as the one at St Gall, someone had the idea of marking the shape of the melody with little symbols above the words of the text. These signs are called “neumes”, from a Greek word meaning “a nod”. They are lines, dots and squiggles that recall the gestures with which the choirmaster directed the singers, raising and lowering his hand.

Neumes did not say how high a note was, only whether the melody went up, went down, paused or wavered. They were useful for someone who already knew the chant, to help remember it, and not for someone who had to learn it from scratch. Singers still had to learn the melodies from their masters, which took years, and if the tradition was broken, the music was lost.

Lines and notes

The decisive step came in the 11th century, in Italy, thanks to a monk named Guido of Arezzo, born around 991. He taught singing to boys in the cathedral schools and noticed how tiring it was to make them learn everything by heart: it took ten years, he said, to train a good singer. So he devised a method.

On the parchment he drew horizontal lines, four of them (today there are five), and coloured some in red and yellow to show particular notes. Each neume, placed on a line or in a space, thus showed a note of exact pitch. This was the musical staff, the basis of every score today.

Guido also invented a trick for remembering sounds. He took a hymn to Saint John the Baptist, “Ut queant laxis”, in which each line begins on a higher note than the one before. The first syllables of the first six lines of the verse, “ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la”, were used to name the six notes. Later “ut” became “do” and “si” was added. To this day the names of the notes come from there. After him there also spread the so-called “Guidonian hand”, a teaching aid attributed to him: each fingertip and each joint of the fingers stood for a note, and the teacher pointed to it with a finger.

Before Arezzo, Guido had lived in the abbey of Pomposa, near Ferrara. There his ideas were not well received by his fellow monks, perhaps out of jealousy, and so he moved to a city where the bishop listened to him and supported him. Guido described his methods in a book, the “Micrologus”, written around 1026. Pope John XIX wanted to meet him and invited him to Rome, where he tested him with an unknown antiphon: the monk learned it in a short time, and the pope was amazed. That is how he tells it himself, in a letter.