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Guido van Arezzo
From HitStory, the pop encyclopedia of School of Rock · Artist
Guido van Arezzo · Guido of Arezzo was an Italian music theorist and teacher of the High Middle Ages, born around the year 991 or 992. He was a Benedictine monk and is regarded as the inventor, or according to some the developer, of the modern musical staff, which had a great influence on Western music notation. Little is known about his life. Most of what we know comes from two letters: a dedicatory letter to Bishop Tedald of Arezzo and a letter to his colleague Michael of Pomposa. His birthplace is uncertain. The two candidates are Arezzo in Tuscany and the abbey of Pomposa on the Adriatic coast.
Music and breakthrough
Around 1013 he went to the abbey of Pomposa, one of the most famous Benedictine monasteries of his time, to complete his training. There he developed the principles of the staff, an ordered visual system for writing and reading music. He set them down in his antiphonary, with a prologue in which he wrote that singers spent far too much time learning melodies by heart. His new teaching method brought him the irritation of his colleagues.
Influence
Bishop Tedald later asked him to train the singers of Arezzo cathedral. There he wrote the Micrologus, a handbook for singers, dedicated to the bishop. Without his staff, music could not be read in the way we know today, not even in pop music.