The Hand That Gave Us Our Notes

[00:00:00]Do you know about the connection between the human hand and the invention of music notation? It's fascinating. I pinky promise. And it all starts with the question, who do you think the most important hand in music history belonged to?

[00:00:24]Bach, Beethoven, Taylor Swift? Maybe it's one of the great musical thinkers like Pythagoras or Alphaabi or Shanker.

[00:00:33]On second thought, please, please don't let it be Shanker.

[00:00:41]Perhaps it's one of the great instrumental pioneers of the last century. Hris certainly comes to mind.

[00:00:47]Maybe even a legend like Miles Davis. I mean, seriously, look at that nail care.

[00:00:53]For my money, history's most important musical hand belonged to an 11th century Benedicting monk called Guido of Aretszo. He was a music theorist back in the day of Gregorian chants and baller haircuts. And much of his work centered around establishing the fundamentals of music that many of us take for granted today. It begins with this mysterious hand found in one of Guido's most important manuscripts, microlois. Fun fact, the word manuscript comes from the Latin words scriptus meaning written and manis meaning hand. It's also where we get the word manual as in by hand. Anywh who, this is Guido's pinky.

[00:01:42]This is Guido if he wasn't a monk.

[00:01:51]>> This is Guido if he was Guido Baggins.

[00:01:57]>> And this is Guido dissing us for poking fun at his musical hand.

[00:02:06]Okay. Okay. Let's let's get serious for a second. What is this? How do we read it? And what does it have to do with musical notation? The key is right here.

[00:02:17]These six notes. Turns out the answer was in the palm of our hands. Sorry, there's there's going to be a lot of hand puns in the rest of this video.

[00:02:30]These six notes make up the Guidonian hexacord.

[00:02:36]You could think of it like a C major 9 add six chord as long as you root the C.

[00:02:42]Otherwise, it's it's probably some sort of G chord with a bunch of add notes.

[00:02:49]Add a flat 7 and it becomes a kind of G mixelyian cluster, which I got to hand it to you. Sounds pretty neat. But let's not get sidetracked. Sorry, flat 7.

[00:03:01]>> Ah, wait. Can I come back for the medieval hexacordal gen jam at the end of the video?

[00:03:06]>> Fine, you got it, buddy.

[00:03:10]>> You might have noticed that these are also the first six notes of the major scale, but the notes themselves aren't the most important thing. The intervals are whole step, whole step, half step, whole step, whole step. The hexad formula is all we really need to build out a tonal framework for understanding medieval chant music.

[00:03:32]>> But wait, what about the leading tone?

[00:03:34]How are we going to jam with an incomplete scale?

[00:03:37]>> Good question, Flat 7. I like where your head's at. But that's not exactly how people thought about music back then.

[00:03:45]Still, you're right. We are going to need more notes. In Guido's day, music was based off of the gamut, a tone system comprising of 20ish notes. Now, 20 is a lot more than six. So, what musicians would do is copy and paste this hexad formula over and over in displacements of fourths until they covered the full range of the gamut.

[00:04:08]Guido noticed that there's just about the right number of segments on the hand to accommodate this range. So he placed this hexad array onto the hand in a spiral pattern like so. Traditionally we would start on G or gamma. G A B C D E.

[00:04:27]This was called the durum or hard hexacord because it contained this B natural or H if you're German.

[00:04:36]Long story. To build another hexacord we need to displace our formula by a fourth. So from G we go to C and build up C D E F G A. This is our natural hexacord which doesn't contain the note B at all. Finally we can build one more with another fourth displacement starting on F. F G A B flat C D. This was called the mole or soft hexacord because it contains this B flat.

[00:05:09]So we have three hexacords. one starting on G, one starting on C, and one starting on F. This hexadic arrangement is why we have the bass, alto, and treble clefts on sheet music today. And it's why they're placed where they're placed on the modern staff. At one time, these were literally the letters C, G, and F that over the centuries scribes stylized into the ornamental symbols we use today. A similar evolution would happen with the soft and hard B, giving us the flat and natural accidentals.

[00:05:40]Guido is often credited for the standardization of staff notation.

[00:05:44]Before Guido and his hand, music was taught by wrote. I'd sing a melody to you.

[00:05:57]Then you'd sing it back to me.

[00:06:04]And we'd go back and forth like this until after years and years of study, you'd have enough repertoire under your belt to be a fullyfledged musician. Now, little cheat sheets like this certainly existed before Guido in a type of protootation called numes. These squiggly lines above the text communicated the general contour of the melody, but it served more like a memory aid because of course you'd already need to be familiar with the music in order for this to help you at all. History thanks Guido for introducing horizontal lines to notation which could indicate precise intervals between notes.

[00:06:42]Suddenly, for the first time, musicians could site readad. With a common framework in place, musicians could now look at a piece of paper and perform a piece of music with a high degree of accuracy without previously being familiar with it. This was huge and paired with a Guidonian hand represented a giant leap in music education towards the future. Now, you may have noticed me using certain qualifiers like history thanks Guido or Guido is often credited with when talking about this musical monk. Guido is known as the father of music notation. But in truth, his work stood on the shoulders of hundreds, maybe even thousands of years of gradual notational developments that came before him. It's not like it was just all Guido, you know. Just take a look at this proto staff found in the 9th century treatis Musa in Kiriatus. This was authored a good century and a half before Guido's time and he definitely knew about this staff. I mean he references Musika in Kiriatus multiple times by name in microlologgis. Now many notable figures contributed to the development of notation. Botheus Hakbald Philip Dovitri Franco of Cologne Ataviano Patruchi just to name the famous ones. But as medievalist John Haynes points out in his paper, the origins of the musical staff, the bulk of the credit is probably most fairly given to the anonymous ingenuity of many, many Carthusian, Franciscan, and Dominican monks who were hard at work transcribing and engraving cotices throughout the Middle Ages. History needs its heroes, people through which we can distill complex truths into useful narratives. And for all that Guido was not, he was a great marketer.

[00:08:39]According to John Haynes, Microlologous was the second most widely disseminated medieval music treatise ever. And so Guido's reach and influence was and is absolutely undeniable.

[00:08:55]But there's one more piece to the Guido hand puzzle, and it might just be the most important part yet. Let's talk about how Guido kind of gave us the names of our notes. Do measo that was him. Although to Guido, it was more like ooti faso.

[00:09:16]This world famous pneumonic device comes from this hymn text which Guido paired with this melody which has this unique feature in where each phrase begins on a different degree of the durum hexacord.

[00:09:35]>> The melody climbs the ladder of the scale fragment and when paired with the text a salobic language of music starts to emerge. This is the birth of Soulfetz.

[00:09:59]family to all.

[00:10:18]>> And for me, this is the coolest part because remember how the hexacords over overlapped with each other to give us the gamut? Well, when Guido applied his protosopesio system to the hexacordal layout, it meant that each of the 20 individual notes of the gamut now had unique identifiable note names. For instance, this D note isn't just a D.

[00:10:41]It's dor. This E is actually ilami. This G is ut and so on and so on. Even our first note G, Guido would have called gamma and paired it with the tonic oot gamma oot gamut or if you're American gamut. In fact, the phrase to run the gamut literally comes from the practice of singing through the hexacords on the hand. Now, the way that a medieval monk would sing through the hexacords is by a series of what were called mutations. In modern language, you might kind of think of it like key modulation, but it's actually a little bit closer to how a Persian musician might modulate through a mac. You see, you couldn't exactly just go like because t or c if you're outside of the United States didn't exactly exist yet, at least not in sfz and not in the way that we tend to think about it today. So how you'd get this note is by mutating from one hexacord to the other. Take durum.

[00:11:53]So fa our fourth degree is where we build that second hexacord. It's also where we mutate. So the fa of the hard hexacord would become the oot of the natural hexacord.

[00:12:12]And you can build an entire tone system like this, going up with hexacordal displacements until your heart is filled with as many notes as you could possibly want. I'll only torture you guys with a single octave, which coincidentally is my entire vocal range.

[00:12:28]So, what's the difference really? Like, why does any of this matter? Because kind of either way, whether or not you're thinking about things in terms of a diietonic scale or overlapping hexacords, the end result is kind of the same in terms of physical pitches. Both methods produce a major scale, or at least they can produce a major scale. I think dissecting the subtle differences here can really highlight something beautiful about the music making process. How we think about theory affects its application. If we think in hexacords, we improvise differently than if we think in scales. Take Bill Evans on Nardis.

[00:13:23]He's thinking in scales. Now let's compare that to someone like Tigran Hamasian playing with the Yeravven State Chamber Choir.

[00:13:55]By contrast, he's thinking more in terms of connected scale fragments, and it really comes through in his playing.

[00:14:03]They both live in the sameish realm of jazz, but how each of them conceptualizes music theory changes and affects how and what they play. There's this dude I found on Instagram recently.

[00:14:18]His name is Etiar Assadly and he does the same kind of thing with his playing.

[00:14:24]Take a listen.

[00:14:37]Now clearly Etabar is coming at things from a perspective more closely rooted in an eastern tradition which tends to be more tetracordal and pentacortal in nature. The technical terms being jintz in the singular and aznas in the plural.

[00:14:52]I want to try something. I'd like to take Guido's medieval hexacordal thinking and apply it to the modern western idiom. I'm so curious to find out how just twisting my own thought processes changes and affects my compositional voice and the music I write. We'll do all the things. We'll go from durum to natural to mole and hit all of the crazy mutations in between. I really want to give each its chance to shine and really ruminate on the character of each hexacord. Anyway, it's uh getting mighty dark out here, so cue the jam.

[00:16:03]Hi. So, uh, fun fact, I actually broke my foot the day before shooting this video.

[00:16:12]Snap. Ouch. Pain. It sucks. But I actually didn't get confirmation of the break until the day after the video. So, now I'm going through the footage and there's just there's just a lot of me pathetically, and I mean pathetically, hobbling around on a broken foot that I don't know is broken yet. the things we do for music theory. In any case, uh if if you noticed me hobbling around in this video, that's why. And if you'd like to contribute to my hospital bills in service of making the best dang music theory content we can ever make, please consider supporting the channel over on Patreon. Huge shout out to all of my patrons. It is genuinely just because of your support that I'm able to keep making these videos. Links will be down below in the thingabber, the doobly-doo.

[00:16:59]You all know what it is. We've got bonus videos on experimental music theory.

[00:17:03]We've got a bunch of extended cuts on certain videos, microonal music theory lectures, all of the things. I've even got sample packs and sampler instruments. So, it's it's a really cool place. Um, and you know, if you're not into that and just want to support the channel, then you're welcome as well. We open everyone. I mean, sorry, we don't open everyone.

[00:17:24]We welcome everyone with open arms and a whole lot of notes.

[00:17:30]Also, huge, huge, huge shout out to Meline and the team at Castello Diam Amorosa for letting me film in this absolutely gorgeous Tuscan Castle. Y'all are the bees knes and Guido would be proud. And if you like this kind of video, consider checking out this one where I built a harmony computer using original plans from the 17th century.

[00:17:53]No, seriously.