guiding spirit
Do you ever think about Guido of Arezzo?
Of course you do, and so do I. He's the guy who invented musical notation. Now just sit down on that fact for an afternoon: before him, people just had to memorize music, passed down from person to person. It took a lifetime to properly learn all the songs of the church year, and even then there were variations that separated region from region. Then old Guido came along and, with a simple graph — up-and-down is pitch, left-to-right is time — it all changed.
Suddenly we can look at a song that's been unsung for a thousand years and know how to sing it. We can express some of our most abstract ideas so successfully that people miles or centuries from us will hear something very much like what we intended. It's just amazing, and it didn't arise from the soil like language did. It didn't come from generations upon generations of gathered knowledge like cooking did. It came from Guido.
Of course you do, and so do I. He's the guy who invented musical notation. Now just sit down on that fact for an afternoon: before him, people just had to memorize music, passed down from person to person. It took a lifetime to properly learn all the songs of the church year, and even then there were variations that separated region from region. Then old Guido came along and, with a simple graph — up-and-down is pitch, left-to-right is time — it all changed.
Suddenly we can look at a song that's been unsung for a thousand years and know how to sing it. We can express some of our most abstract ideas so successfully that people miles or centuries from us will hear something very much like what we intended. It's just amazing, and it didn't arise from the soil like language did. It didn't come from generations upon generations of gathered knowledge like cooking did. It came from Guido.
Comments
But I guess there's a reason singers like it. (It's the closest many of them get to understanding theory.)