The Musical Hand

 For thousands of years the human hand has functioned as a practical mnemonic device, a teaching tool, and a visual prompt to enhance one’s capacity to recollect or understand subject matter from a variety of disciplines. Shown here is a “Guidonian hand”—essentially a map containing an arrangement of the twenty pitches (designated by some combination of the syllables ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la) that comprised the medieval musical gamut; it proceeded from the lowest note (called “Gamma-ut”) located at the tip of the thumb, through its highest note (“E la”), found on the back tip of the middle finger. The hand’s structure also embodied the network of relations between those twenty steps.