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Title
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Guidonian Hand
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Description
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Guido of Arezzo was a Benedictine monk born shortly before the year 1000 C.E. and educated at the abbey of Pomposa, Italy. He quickly became known for his skill in training his fellow monks to perform the many chants and hymns they were required to memorize. Performance of the Daily Office and the Mass in the abbeys and cathedrals of the Church was the primary duty of priests and monks in the Middle Ages. But much of the Office and the Mass was sung, and the chants and hymns for both changed from day to day, meaning that monks and priests were required to learn thousands of chants in order to perform the liturgy of the Hours and the Mass. If you add the chants of the Office to those of the Mass, the historian Kenneth Levy has calculated that a monk would have memorized at least 75 hours of choral music, more than the music of Beethoven and Wagner combined.
Even though the Guidonian hand is not explained in any of Guido’s surviving works, he is so frequently credited with its development by later medieval music theorists that scholars believe he likely gave it the form and function we see here. It depicts three consecutive and overlapping hexachords (i.e., six-tone scales), starting with the thumb, continuing across the base of the fingers, up the pinkie, across the fingertips, down the index finger, over the middle to the ring finger, then back to the middle finger and up to its tip. While something simpler had been devised previously for a four-tone scale, it was not as elaborate or as detailed as Guido’s design. Although we don’t know exactly how the hand was used in practice, two methods seem possible: pointing out the various notes of a chant in the dim interiors of cathedrals and monasteries by pointing to various parts of the hand, and doing the same in monasteries in which vows of silence were the norm.
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Designer
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Guido of Arezzo
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Date
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1750
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Source
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En el Arte de Cantollano y Canto de Organo
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is composed of
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English
Square
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has attribute
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English
Solid Line
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depict things of type
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English
Conceptual
