Guido d'Arezzo's Regule rithmice, Prologus in antiphonarium, and Epistola ad michahelem: A Critical Text and Translation (review)

Guido d'Arezzo's Regule rithmice, Prologus in antiphonarium, and Epistola ad Michahelem: A Critical Text and Translation, with an Introduction, Annotations, Indices, and New Manuscript Inventories. By Dolores Pesce. (Musicological Studies, 73.) Ottawa: Institute of Mediaeval Music, 1999. [vii, 615 p. ISBN 1-896926-18-5. $120.]

Understanding the music of the Middle Ages as contemporaries did is one of the challenges facing present-day music historians. In the virtual absence of medieval aesthetic or critical judgments about music, modern scholars and performers often rely on theoretical treatises, the largest body of medieval writings about music. Many of these treatises consider musica as a mathematical discipline, illustrating their teaching on proportions and interval measurement with complex diagrams that seem to have little bearing on musical practice. Guido of Arezzo (d. after 1033), arguably the most widely read and influential medieval music theorist (a status that might be challenged only by Boethius), furnished guidance on what he termed the "cantandi scientiam," a concept that embraced both useful theoretical principles and the practical skill needed to perform the music of the church's liturgy.

About seventy manuscripts containing one or another of Guido's four authentic treatises (Micrologus, Regule rithmice [so called because of its verse format], Prologus in antiphonarium, and Epistola ad Michahelem) survive. The texts are not always complete, and glosses have been inserted--particularly in the case of the Regule--to amplify certain passages. Guido's works were printed in the monumental eighteenth-century edition of music theorists prepared by Martin Gerbert (Scriptores ecclesiastici de musica sacra potissimum . . . [St. Blaise, 1784]), but it was not until the efforts of Joseph Smits van Waesberghe that a solid foundation of knowledge about the sources was achieved. He published an edition of the Micrologus (Corpus Scriptorum de Musica, 4 [n.p.: American Institute of Musicology, 1955]), on which the English translation by Warren Babb (in Hucbald, Guido, and John on Music, ed. Claude Palisca [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978], 49-83) was based. Smits van Waesberghe also published editions of two other works of Guido, his Prologus to a now lost antiphoner and the Regule (Guidonis Prologus in antiphonarium, Divitiae Musicae Artis, A.3 [Buren: Frits Knuf, 1975] and Guidonis Aretini Regulae rhythmice, Divitiae Musicae Artis, A.4 [Buren: Frits Knuf, 1985]).

In her discussion of the authenticity and chronology of the Guidonian corpus, Dolores Pesce essentially agrees with the conclusions of Smits van Waesberghe and Palisca. Guido apparently wrote all of his surviving works over the span of a few years. His earliest surviving treatise, Micrologus, must have been written about 1026, after he had taken refuge in Arezzo from the hostility that his teaching methods encountered among the monks of his home monastery of Pomposa. He subsequently refined and developed his teachings, which came to a focal point with the production of an antiphoner (now lost) notated according to the principles expounded in the Regule rithmice and in the prologue to the antiphoner itself. Last in order of composition, and thus the definitive summary of Guido's theoretical system, is the long letter (388 lines in the present edition) addressed to his friend Michael at Pomposa. The dating of the Epistola is based on Guido's report therein of a trip to Rome undertaken at the behest of Pope John XIX (1024-1033), who had three times requested Guido's presence to demonstrate his teaching. The pope became very enthusiastic about the new methods of notation and sightsinging. In fact, John would not let Guido depart until he had learned how to sing a melody he had never heard previously. Since John had progressed from layman to pope in a single day (and paid handsomely for the privilege, it is asserted), it might well be possible that his...