The Origins of the Musical Staff

Abstract

Who can blame music historians for frequently claiming that Guido of Arezzo invented the musical staff? Given the medieval period’s unmanageable length, it must often be reduced to as streamlined a shape as possible, with some select significant heroes along the way to push ahead the plot of musical progress: Gregory invented chant; the troubadours, vernacular song; Leoninus and Perotinus, polyphony; Franco of Cologne, measured notation. And Guido invented the staff. To be sure, not all historians put it quite this way. Some, such as Richard Hoppin, write more cautiously that “the completion of the four-line staff . . . is generally credited to Guido d’Arezzo,” or, in the words of the New Grove Dictionary of Music, that Guido “is remembered today for his development of a system of precise pitch notation through lines and spaces.” Such occasional caution aside, however, the legend of Guido as inventor of the staff abides and pervades. In his Notation of Polyphonic Music, Willi Apel writes of “the staff, that ingenious invention of Guido of Arezzo.” As Claude Palisca puts it in his biography of Guido, it was that medieval Italian music writer’s prologue to his antiphoner around 1030 that contained one of the “brilliant proposals that launched the Guido legend, the device of staff notation.” “Guido’s introduction of a system of four lines and four spaces” is, in Paul Henry Lang’s widely read history, an “achievement” deemed “one of the most significant in the history of music.” And in the most recent Oxford History of Western Music, we read that “the man responsible for this signal achievement,” the staff, was “Guido of Arezzo, who around 1030 (in the prologue to an antiphoner) first proposed placing neumes on the lines and spaces of a ruled staff to define their precise pitch content.” To this “legend in his own time,” the history goes on to say, “we, who still rely on his inventions nearly a thousand years later, owe him a lot, as did all the generations of Western musicians preceding us.” To be fair, this recent view of Guido as inventor of the staff owes its existence to an impressive tradition, long and deeply entrenched.