Music Theory worksheets. Ut queant laxis. Ut queant laxis or Hymnus in Ioannem are verses in honour of John the Baptist written in Horatian Sapphics by Paulus Diaconus, the eighth century Lombard historian. The first syllable of each hemistich (half line of verse) has given its name to a successive note. The use of Ut queant laxis to name the tones is usually attributed to Guido of Arezzo in the eleventh century, who proposed a name for the first six tones. Later, the "si" was added in the 18th century. The musical origins of the hymn are less clear, but the melody shares a common ancestor with the eleventh-century arrangement of Horace's Ode to Phyllis (4.11) recorded in the Montpellier manuscript H425.
In this melody, each of the first six musical phrases of each stanza of the hymn begins on a successively higher note of the hexachord, corresponding to the tone proposed by Guido of Arezzo, except the last line, Sancte Iohannes, which is an adonius after the three Sapphic hendecasyllables, breaking the ascending pattern.
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