The Origins of the Musical Staff
The Origins of the Musical Staff John Haines For Michel Huglo, master and friend Who can blame music historians for frequently claiming that Guido of Arezzo invented the musical staff? Given the medieval period’s unma- nageable 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 trouba- dours, 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,”1 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.”2 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.”3 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.”4 “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
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