You’ve probably heard the phrase ‘run the gamut’, which sounds like something torturous in The Hunger Games. Don’t worry though, a thing that runs the gamut is actually just something that covers every possible point in a range. So if you’re feeling all the feelings, you can be described as having ‘run the gamut of emotions’.
But WTF is a gamut?
Guido of Arezzo laying down some phat beats
Allow me to take you back to the 11th century to meet a monk called Guido of Arezzo. Guido’s favourite thing to do was to organise sounds (obviously – well, I guess he didn’t have Netflix). He also spent a lot of time teaching Gregorian chant to young monks, and as part of this he developed a way to teach his singers to remember the musical scale more easily. He named the very lowest note in his scale ‘gamma-ut’. This was from ‘gamma’, the Greek letter used for that low note, and ‘ut’, the first syllable of an ancient hymn Guido loved. Over time, ‘gamma-ut’ was shortened to, you’ve guessed it, ‘gamut’, and people began using it to refer to the entire musical range of notes.
As musical theory evolved, so did ‘gamut’. It grew beyond music to mean a full scope or range of anything, which is why we get to run gamuts today in any arena we like.
I confess that I’ve done Guido a bit of a disservice above, as he wasn’t just a singing teacher. In fact, he’s known as the father of modern musical notation. Guido’s most significant contribution was to develop a musical notation system that allowed notes to be written down and read consistently. He also created the basis of the four-line staff, which positioned notes at fixed heights to show their pitch more clearly than earlier systems. This eventually led to the five-line staff we use today.
He didn’t stop there either. Guido also invented the solfège syllables, AKA ‘do-re-mi’. He originally used ‘ut-re-mi-fa-sol-la’ from a Latin hymn for St John the Baptist, and maybe just because he seemed to like an ‘ut’. This helped singers remember pitch relationships more effectively, and revolutionised teaching music by ear.
Guido’s inventions allowed people to share music in written form across Europe. So it’s pretty safe to say that without him, we wouldn’t have most of the music we have today. Or that song from The Sound of Music.