Guido D'Arezzo
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Sobriquet: D'Arezzo
Appearance: D'Arezzo is a handsome man in his late 30's. He has long flowing brown mustaches. He has beautiful long hair that he keeps tied back in a braid. His eyes are a brilliant blue.
Behavior: D'Arezzo is a very brash and obnoxious man. He has been aristocracy for so long he doesn't know any other way to be. He is the lord of the manner, respectful to his seniors, but dismissive of the rabble.
History: Guido was a monk of the Benedictine order from the Italian city-state of Arezzo. Recent research has dated his Micrologus to 1025 or 1026; since Guido stated in a letter that he was thirty-four when he wrote it, his birthdate is presumed to be around 991 or 992. His early career was spent at the monastery of Pomposa, on the Adriatic coast near Ferrara. While there, he noted the difficulty that singers had in remembering Gregorian chants.
He came up with a method for teaching the singers to learn chants in a short time, and quickly became famous throughout north Italy. However, he attracted the hostility of the other monks at the abbey with his arrogance, prompting him to move to Arezzo, a town which had no abbey, but which did have a large group of cathedral singers, whose training Bishop Tedald invited him to conduct. While at Arezzo, he developed new techniques for teaching, such as staff notation and the use of the "ut–re–mi–fa–so–la" (do–re–mi–fa–so–la) mnemonic (solmization). The ut–re–mi-fa-so-la syllables are taken from the initial syllables of each of the first six half-lines of the first stanza of the hymn Ut queant laxis, whose text is attributed to the Italian monk and scholar Paulus Diaconus (though the musical line either shares a common ancestor with the earlier setting of Horace's "Ode to Phyllis" recorded in the Montpellier manuscript H425, or may even have been taken from it. Giovanni Battista Doni is known for having changed the name of note "Ut" (C), renaming it "Do" (in the "Do Re Mi ..." sequence known as solfège). A seventh note, "Si" (from the initials for "Sancte Iohannes," Latin for St. John the Baptist) was added shortly after to complete the diatonic scale.[3] In Anglophone countries, "Si" was changed to "Ti" by Sarah Glover in the nineteenth century so that every syllable might begin with a different letter (this also freed up Si for later use as Sol-sharp). "Ti" is used in tonic sol-fa and in the song "Do-Re-Mi".
The Micrologus, written at the cathedral at Arezzo and dedicated to Tedald, contains Guido's teaching method as it had developed by that time. Soon it had attracted the attention of Pope John XIX, who invited Guido to Rome. D'Arezzo's stint in Rome had drawn the attention of the Ventrue Gaius Papius Mutilus. His hand with music and arrogance intrigued the Ventrue elder. He met the monk and talked with him for some time. At the end of the second night of talks, D'Arezzo was ready for the embrace. Gaius Mutilus embraced him with the permission of the Prince. This was in 1028, but he soon returned to Arezzo, due to his "poor health". It was then that he announced in a letter to Michael of Pomposa ("Epistola de ignoto cantu") his discovery of the "ut–re–mi" musical mnemonic. It galled him that he the slipped into obscurity as a servant of Clan Ventrue. D'Arezzo wanted much more than to be an obscure music notation creator.
D'Arezzo came to Paris in the 12th century.
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Credit to the Author: D'Arezzo has been a pain in my ass. He pops up all over in the stories written at Paris La Nuit, but there is no other notes on him. What appears here and his place in the lineage of Ventrue is of my own making. (Keith November 25, 2016)
