In the town of Arezzo today, one of the grandest open spaces near the medieval edifices of the city centre bears an intriguing name: the Piazza Guido Monaco. The famous monk himself, Guido, stands there immortalised in an enormous stone monument, his right hand holding open a book with plainchant notation while the left pulls up his thick robes to allow a tapping foot to peek out from underneath. Literally a great man, this granite grandfather of music offers a tangible image of a medieval inventor musicae, a discoverer of the secrets of a most mathematical art, inventor of fundamental tools still used today in musical pedagogy and notation. City and nation have every reason to pride themselves on their celebrated musical forebear.

Unsurprisingly, the square in Arezzo and its monumental statue are later nineteenth-century constructions, put in place at a period when civic and national pride unapologetically shaped the past. Then as now, Guido was more a symbol than a historical personage, a convenient focal point for aggregating myths from a little-known early point in Western music history, regardless of their veracity. This is not merely reflected in the popular misconceptions floating around today among music-lovers and students (Guido as the inventor of music notation), but also in scholarly usage, where the term ‘Guidonian’ finds employment in discussing concepts which do not derive directly from Guido's texts, such as the late medieval gamut articulated into seven overlapping hexachords. It was a confused image already in the Middle Ages, with theoretical texts and treatises attributing concepts to Guido rather dubiously for the sake of invoking auctoritas, in an intellectual environment which played rather loosely with ideas of authorship and tradition (from our standpoint). The late medieval view of Guido's teachings, in other words, was vastly different from what we can now securely associate with the monk on the basis of the surviving texts. Although it is generally recognised that the relation of Guidonian ‘tradition’ to the historical Guido is problematic and complex, the subject has long been due for a modern treatment taking advantage of the large proportion of surviving medieval theory texts now available. With Stefano Mengozzi's book-length study, that need is now met, but with an unexpected twist: as the title proclaims, the ‘Renaissance’ environment of humanistic textual studies played a crucial role in shaping the modern understanding of Guido's theories and their impact on musical culture.

The approach here can be termed ‘revisionist’: Mengozzi offers his investigation as a corrective to apparent scholarly misconceptions concerning Guidonian theory and its reception. Weaving various strands of enquiry together – the historical circumstances of Guido's pedagogy, the spread of his teachings throughout Europe, the incremental development and systematisation of his pedagogical tools (‘post-Guidonian’ theory), the various competing conceptions of pitch space of different theorists – the book announces numerous corrections to currently dominant ideas in the history of music theory and practice. The issue goes much deeper than simply investigating and deciding precisely what Guido did or did not teach personally; it is about how the concepts of solmisation and hexachords integrated themselves into musical thought, affecting how we understand and analyse music from a time span of at least half a millenium.

This is, then, potentially an extremely wide field of enquiry, which can encompass almost any study involving pitch in late medieval and Renaissance music. Mengozzi had his work cut out for him in taking on such a vast literature, and had to limit his subjects accordingly, concentrating almost completely on the theoretical texts and their interpretation. Little attention is bestowed, for instance, on the infamous radical hexachordal theories with which some modern writers have attempted to interpret pitch content in polyphony (Gaston Allaire, Christian Berger, Jehoash Hirschberg), which have gained little acceptance. Mengozzi, however, also names and confronts more influential writings which have shaped the modern understanding of medieval pitch concepts, by for instance Margarent Bent, Karol Berger and Richard Crocker. If there is no single universally accepted theory of how solmisation interacted with musical practice, it is generally taken as a secure assumption that late medieval and Renaissance musicians understood and discussed pitch relations with the vocabulary of the solmisation syllables, arranged within the six-note segments of ‘hexachords’ (as they were increasingly called from the late fifteenth century on). Mengozzi's contention is that this hexachordal conception of pitch space, and solmisation theory in general, has been given far too much prominence in scholarship. The entire system represents an overly complex accretion of later ideas onto Guido's simple pedagogical device, confusing the simple elegance of the octave-based lettering system with the overlapping hexachords of the gamut, and was ultimately fairly marginal to musical thought even up to the sixteenth century. Once again a tall order, given the current state of scholarly consensus.

Mengozzi's plan of attack is twofold, represented in the two main halves of the book: ‘Guidonian solmization in music theory and practice’, focusing largely on the sources up to around 1400; and then ‘Reforming the music curriculum in the age of humanism’, building on that medieval base to approach the book's title matter, investigating a number of case studies from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.Footnote ¹ The ‘medieval’ section of the book, with its discussions of Guido and the real extent of his teachings, makes for interesting reading and should be a good refresher even for those already familiar with medieval theory. A considerable amount of new material, however, is found in the investigations of the transmission of Guidonian theory, with numerous tabulations of relevant texts and sources (for instance, tables of treatises up to 1200 which do and do not mention solmisation syllables, and Guidonian hand diagrams in surviving sources up to 1500). This type of survey-based investigation into medieval theory is facilitated enormously by the Center for the History of Music Theory and Literature's Thesaurus Musicarum Latinarum (TML), with its freely available online texts of treatises affording the author (and his readers) a far greater control of the sources than ever before.Footnote ² Although the TML relies heavily on published editions of widely varying quality and is far from complete (despite the massive amount of text currently available), it is fair to assume that we can trust the rough overview it offers of subjects and approaches in the surviving sources at different periods.

There are, however, more serious dangers in some of the conclusions one might draw from simply surveying what survives today. Take, for instance, Mengozzi's remarks on the geographical distribution of hand diagrams before 1500, with German-speaking regions represented by some seventy-four diagrams (more than half of what survives): ‘More striking still is the realization that fewer than twenty extant Hands in total originated in France, the Low Countries, and England, considering that the network of cathedral schools in these regions trained scores of future professional singers and composers during the period under consideration’ (p. 73). A quantitative analysis of this data is complicated by non-trivial problems. How does the apparent geographical bias in surviving hand diagrams relate to geographical bias in overall source survival? What of the chronological shifts – is it useful to make detailed judgements based on 450 years' worth of European sources lumped together (conceptually easier for us when the years are 1050–1500 instead of 1550–2000)? As Mengozzi himself notes, the evidence comes overwhelmingly from the fifteenth century. Of the forty-two Italian manuscripts in this survey of hands, for instance, only four are definitely dated before 1400 (pp. 68–9). This represents not only a change in the distribution of ‘Guidonian’ traditions after 1400, but more generally a massive increase in the number of surviving sources of music theory. The reader would see a vastly different picture if Mengozzi's tables covered 1050–1400 instead of 1050–1500, with much smaller numbers yielding shakier data in terms of statistical significance. There are interesting conclusions to be drawn from all this early data, as there are undoubtedly important historical developments reflected in the differing distributions of Guidonian sources in different times and places, but the bare data itself needs to be observed with careful circumspection given the many uncontrolled variables in play.

When the study moves on to the musica practica treatises of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the task of downplaying the centrality of solmisation would seem to become a huge challenge. As with the sudden surge in hand diagrams, there is at this point a vast increase in theory sources employing solmisation in one way or another, and that should come as no surprise. After all, the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries saw the rise of polyphonic compositions which make explicit reference to the practice; think of Josquin's famous solmisation devices in the L'homme armé mass super voces musicales and Missa Hercules dux ferrarie among others, or the pieces of the same period bearing motivic titles like La mi la sol or Ut re mi fa sol la.Footnote ³ Along with clefless pieces, solmisation-based imitative motifs and other tricks, the music starts reflecting a basic and widespread acceptance of solmisation as the rudimentary language of pitch relations. This sort of material, however – the evidence of the musical sources and compositions – is not the subject here, and in fact goes entirely unexplored in Mengozzi's book, which seeks instead to tell the story of the theorists and their shifting understanding of the musical past. More specifically, it is a story of subtle yet deliberate manipulation of that past: revisionist history for ideological ends as practised in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.

Mengozzi wants us to see the sixteenth-century understanding of hexachordal solmisation as the product of a humanistically informed intellectual programme forwarded by a very few central figures, principally Gaffurius, with his ‘more learned than accurate’ transmission of Guidonian theory (p. 14). In contrast to the wide-ranging medieval theory surveys of the first half of the book, the sections on Renaissance ‘reforms’ are focused almost exclusively on a few writers, and specifically on their (often historically oriented) statements regarding Guido and solmisation. The major players who receive detailed treatment from this point in the narrative are Ciconia, Conrad of Zabern, Gallicus, Burtius, Gaffurius, and Zarlino (the last two receiving an individual chapter each). There are some lovely close readings and historical contextualisation here; Mengozzi's sensitive explorations of the social and intellectual backgrounds of his Renaissance texts would be worth reading even divorced from the book's main arguments.

The focus on individual theorists in the book's second half makes for a very different kind of text than the story of the initial spread of Guidonian theory. Now Mengozzi presents material in terms of orthodoxies and reforms as exemplified in specific treatises, but interestingly all of his Renaissance authors are considered reformers in some way, despite their very different views on solmisation. Ciconia, Conrad of Zabern and Gallicus are called in to give voice to a new dissatisfaction with the hexachordal system. Ciconia notes that a singer should use either the hand (‘like the Guidonists’) or the monochord, ‘which, like a good teacher, never misleads’ (p. 129); Gallicus, more forcefully, asserts that ‘the six syllables must be considered all the more superfluous, as they oppress the minds of the learners with confusion and tedium’ (p. 154). Gaffurius and Zarlino, on the other hand, are the proponents (even creators) of a new, ‘strong’ reading of the hexachord as the fundamental structural unit of sixteenth-century pitch space. Their need to defend traditional theory by couching it in classicising terms as part of a humanist renewal programme led to an apparent distortion of medieval pitch theory. The hexachord became analogous to the ancient tetrachord, a basic building block out of which the gamut is constructed, rather than a segment of labels laid over an existing scalar space constructed by the monochord (leading even to Gaffurius's peculiar labelling of F-hexachords as coniunctum or synemmenon because of their B♭, analogous to the ancient synemmenon tetrachord of the Lesser Perfect System).

It comes down at this point to a question of relevance and influence. We know very well who won out as the most widely read theorists in the sixteenth century; Gaffurius and Zarlino became and have remained the flagbearers of our central readings of early theory not just concerning pitch but many aspects of musical practice. All the more interesting, then, if these men consciously and artificially solidified a new hexachordal conception of pitch space against the freer and more purely descriptive medieval application of solmisation. With the fifteenth-century critics of solmisation, however, the relevance of their texts for the mainstream of musical practice remains a difficult issue. Mengozzi is at pains to argue that Ciconia's treatise, in spite of some past interpretations, was not merely a speculative intellectual text; the treatise, of course, is also far from unequivocal about the usefulness of solmisation, as the citation above indicates. Of Gallicus, we know that his treatise was read and discussed by Ramos and Burtius among others involved in their debates, but beyond this it seems to have had little influence in the realm of practical music. No surprise! Gallicus and Conrad of Zabern were more radical in their reformist views than merely questioning the usefulness of Guidonian solmisation: their proposals to overhaul musical practice and revert to the older, pure conventions of the early Church also means an abandonment of polyphony altogether. These ideas situate these writers in the middle of some extremely interesting fifteenth-century debates regarding the value and status of music in the church,Footnote ⁴ but this also calls into question their connection to the musical worlds which writers like Tinctoris and Aaron were addressing. If there was any sort of wider call for solmisation reform in the courts, cities, grammar schools and chapel choirs of Renaissance Europe, the evidence is not in the music manuals.

If the historical discussion in the book therefore illuminates an interesting trajectory – the development of the ‘post-Guidonian’ pitch system, followed by a split into those who would either eliminate it completely or turn the hexachord into the fundamental structuring unit of their pitch space – it remains uncertain how we can take this to affect concrete practice and analysis. If one follows Mengozzi's many criticisms throughout of the unwieldy overlapping hexachordal system (his personal critiques of late medieval solmisation flow at times freely into the arguments voiced by the early theorists), he seems to want scholars largely to abandon the language of solmisation in early music analysis, without daring to say this outright. This central argument remains somewhat unclear within the spread of historical and theoretical critiques on display. It is one thing to understand the hexachord (or the sixth) as conceptually the fundamental structuring unit in sixteenth-century polyphony (the ‘strong’ reading of hexachordal theory, still today a fairly marginal idea despite Mengozzi's claims that he is contradicting the musicological mainstream),Footnote ⁵ and something else entirely to accept that the language of solmisation was central to how musicians at the time understood intervallic relations. As an example I offer two cases, chosen more or less at random, of how some anonymous fifteenth-century writers – the ones giving practical day-to-day instructions for singers/composers, not those apparently pushing reforms and agendas – discuss pitch while giving concrete instructions for discanting/making counterpoint:

London, British Library, Add. MS 21455, f. 10^v (c. 1400):Footnote ⁶

In other words, when the tenor/cantus firmus has the note E, a discanting voice underneath it singing in ‘properchant’ (the natural hexachord) can sing only ut (C, a third); whereas if the tenor has a, the discant beneath it can sing fa (F, third), re (D, fifth), or ut (C, sixth).

Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS lat. 14741, f. 9 (fifteenth century):Footnote ⁷

Here the writer explains that a discanter should not sharpen a returning note if the progression is octave–fifth–octave (instead of octave–sixth–octave). One possible realisation of this progression is D–F–D in the Tenor against d–c–d in the Discant; but the description with solmisation syllables and intervals in the French manuscript is more generic than that, being concerned with the intervals rather than the specific gamut steps on which these are placed.

In both of these cases, the writers mix letter terminology, interval names, and Guidonian syllables rather freely. These are not exceptions; they employ the standard language found in counterpoint manuals of the period and the standard language in countless notes and small scrap items copied informally into books of all sorts, testifying to the widespread adoption of solmisation as the lingua franca of pitch relations probably by the fourteenth century at the latest.Footnote ⁸ It is difficult to understand why Mengozzi insists on a dichotomy: either one conceives of pitch space in terms of octaves and octave duplication of interval structures (seven distinct notes, simple, ancient) or else one becomes mired in the complexities of hexachords (overlapping tonal segments, ambiguous, a late corruption of Guido's teachings). How much of this vigorous argumentation is directed in fact at straw men? Both then and now, hexachordal theory has been viewed as only part of a broad and varied late medieval conception of pitch space. To my knowledge, there is no general musicological denial of the fact that early musicians recognised the fundamental importance of octave duplication; the concept is present from the earliest treatises and is inherent in the A–G pitch lettering system of the gamut. It does not follow from this, however, that solmisation was seen as an alternative to the seven letters, as Mengozzi so often presents it. There is no gamut, no solmisation theory, without the letters, and the vast majority of musicians saw no incompatibility between these. Even a radical critic of the hexachordal system like Ramos de Pareja was willing to discuss intervallic relations in his treatise using Guidonian syllables when it suited him;Footnote ⁹ while Gallicus offered a simplified one-syllable-per-letter gamut (ut–re–mi–fa–sol–la–fa–sol–la …), a necessary concession to the convention of conceptualising intervallic relations with syllables.Footnote ¹⁰ If we wish to do justice to the rich complexity of early music theory, we have to be willing to accept a certain polyvalence or multiplicity within these texts, even when it seems to create conceptual complications.

Ultimately the constant polemical interjections regarding the solmisation system end up weakening the historical arguments in the book; Mengozzi does himself no favours by vocally taking a side in a debate which took place over 500 years ago. It is a pity that so many excellent close readings and some quite interesting historical discussions are constantly in danger of being lost in hyperbolic rhetoric and exaggerations (Ciconia in the passage cited above expressed himself ‘so passionately and unequivocally against Guidonian solmization’, p. 130; while Gaffurius championed hexachordal solmisation ‘in spite of the writings by Gallicus and Ramos, well known to him, that had exposed its limitations’, p. 224). Readers with no previous knowledge of the matters at hand may find many points of the discussion difficult to follow, but those who do know the territory will be hard pressed to find further examples supporting Mengozzi's anti-solmisation reading of Renaissance theory. What comes of all of this in terms of practical implications, furthermore, remains very difficult to judge. How would our modern analyses change if we ignored every Renaissance treatise in the Gaffurian tradition? Should we be considering pitch in fifteenth-century motets through the lens of a keyboard-style model of chromatic pitch space? How does this affect our treatment of accidentals (consider Tinctoris's statement that a flat remains active until the singer mutates to a different hexachord)?Footnote ¹¹ Countless questions remain. Perhaps that is the stuff of an eventual sequel.