This article is just plain neat. You would not believe how difficult this sort of thing is to dig up, or how many sources I actually ended up referencing. A good encyclopedia is a decent place to start, though, if you are interested in the subject. ("solfa" and "music theory" are two relevant topics)
Do, re ,mi, fa, sol, la, ti, do. You've been singing the scale to these syllables for years, but you never knew what they meant. Or you thought they meant nothing. Or maybe you hate me because now you can get that song from The Sound of Music out of your head. Well, guess what, they do have some meaning. It took some work, but we here at Game Control are tireless and consummate researchers, and now we can all enjoy the fruits of that effort.
Hexachords
In medieval Europe, quite a lot of their standard music was of course sacred music, and the only group that really had a need to write down and distribute a musical idea was the church. But there was no way to do this easily across national (and language) borders. Enter a bright young Italian monk in the 11th century, Guido of Arezzo. He was a teacher and writer of music, and you could also call him a pioneer in music theory. He came up with the idea of a hexachord, a six-note pattern that corresponds to the first six notes of the major scale (e.g. C-D-E-F-G-A). Well, actually he just adapted something that already existed, though no one really thought of it as a scale before Guido came along. It seems there was this really famous hymn to St. John the Baptist (the 11th century equivalent of a number one hit song) and that this hymn just happened to have, as its melody line, an ascending scale built into it. Yeah, so maybe that's not really much of a song. But it did give Guido a starting point, and it also gave him a convenient, easily recognizable way to name the notes of his newly devised scale. The hymn itself, in Latin of course, is:
ut queant laxisNot quite Rodgers and Hammerstein, but the overall effect is indeed the same. By borrowing the first syllable from each line, our man Guido arrived at the series ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la. This series became a medieval musical standard, the hexachord.
resonare fibris
mira gestorum
famuli tuorum
solve polluti
labii reatum, Sancte Iohannes
The hexachord was extensively used in medieval and Renaissance musical theory and education. Its value was that it gave the singer a fixed set of pitch relations by which he could orient himself as he sang. It proved to be both a practical and effective way to teach the sight-reading of music, and also allowed the monks to teach each other individual melodies. The essence of the hexachord system is that each hexachord includes only one semitone, between mi and fa, no matter how high or low the sequence of pitches is sung. By mutating, or switching from one hexachord (say beginning at C) to an overlapping one (say, beginning on F), the singer could always place the syllables mi-fa on any half step in the music.
These singing monks eventually came up with names for these overlapping hexachords, by calling them either natural, hard, or soft. The thing to look at here is the semitone, or the step between mi and fa. The natural hexachord started on C, and by humming the scale a bit we find that mi is E and fa is F. The hard hexachord started on G, so we can determine that in this hexachord mi is B and fa is C. These are "natural" semitones, and you might notice that they are the places where there is no separating black key on a piano. The soft hexachord started on F, but here we run into a problem. In the F scale, mi is A, but fa cannot be B, for B is a whole tone (not a semitone) above A. In the soft hexachord, fa is therefore B flat. Both B and B flat were thus accomodated by a system of hexachords that always kept the same relative pitches on the sequence between ut and la. Medieval singers were provided one set of pitches that they could always use to orient themselves, and by working with mutating semitones, they laid the groundwork for the modern twelve note chromatic scale.
A pupil learned to sing his gamut by memorizing the sound of the series ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la as it was sung. He then knew at what point to make the semitone interval mi-fa, and whether or not the music included B or B flat. If he needed to sing B he used the hard hexachord, if he needed to sing B flat he used the soft hexachord.
At the peak of its development, there was a system of seven overlapping hexachords. The medieval system started on a low G, a hard hexachord. Ascending the hard hexachord to its fourth note, fa, the singer would find himself singing a C, which also happens to be the start of, or ut, of the natural hexachord. The full name of this note is therefore "C fa ut". (Not exactly a concise or intuitive method for naming notes, but hey, it's the dark ages.) He could then think himself into the overlapping hexachord by taking this C as ut and continuing from there. This process of transferring to an overlapping hexachord at the pivotal points is called mutation. It enabled the singer to apply the syllables to any series of notes he encountered, although he would have to take musical context into consideration in choosing the best note on which to mutate.
Matt's fun-with-words trivia: The Full Gamut
We know the use of the word gamut to refer to the whole range of something, be they human emotions or items on a salad bar. Originally, though, this referred only to the full range of musical notes. As stated above, the medieval scale started on G, and they called this note by the syllable ut. Of course, these musicians stole quite a few of their ideas from the Greeks, including the use of letters in musical notation. Thus, their base scale would start on the gamma (not a modern G, but a Greek one) and the range of notes would begin with gamma-ut. (While through the process of mutation, ut may designate several notes, there will be only one gamma-ut.) Thus, gamma-ut came to represent the whole of the scale. (In a similar fashion, the alpha-beta pair eventually wound up being used to name the whole alphabet. See how it works?) We gradually muddied the pronunciation until it became our modern word gamut. No, really. Look it up.
"...which brings us back to do, do, do, do..."
You may have noticed, reading through the preceeding paragraphs, that the syllable ut sounds more like someone burping than a beautiful musical tone. The 16th century Italians agreed with you; at about this time in northern Italy, the syllable ut was replaced by the now-familiar do, which was considered to be more sing-able. The French also had to mess with a perfectly good system (don't they always?) so during this century we saw the addition of the second semitone marker in our scale, which they called si. English musical scholars decided that ti would be a better syllable, and since you speak English, you sing about "a drink with jam and bread" when you go up the scale. And so, after 500 years of tinkering, we finally get to do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, do.
Two modern uses of the solmization syllables subsequently developed. In Italy, France, and Spain the syllables became attached to fixed pitches, the fixed-do system: do meaning C, re=D, mi=E, fa=F, sol=G, la=A, and si=B. Elsewhere, like the aforementioned hills alive with the sound of music, a movable-do system prevailed, in which do always represented the first note of a major scale, but could be any pitch (thus allowing the singer to associate syllable names with given intervals, as in the old hexachord system).
Other Systems of Solmization
Actually, a lot of cultures had names for the notes, particularly those that never developed written notation for music. In cultures with an oral tradition of music, solmization (the naming of each degree of a basic scale with a word or syllable) is important. The older a musical system is, the more likely it is to only have names for the pentatonic, or five note scale. A pentatonic scale has the same mathematical basis as our own, but is missing notes corresponding to the 3rd and 7th notes of a "standard" scale.
One additional comment should be made here: while the modern western scale has the same mathematical origins as the pentatonic scale, they are tuned differently today. Pentatonic scales still rely on simple fractions, the basic relationships that Pythagoras (and others, apparently) figured out about lyre strings those many centuries ago. Modern scientific tuning now uses uniform semitone intervals based on the 12th root of 2. The two do result in slightly different pitches for notes that otherwise bear the same names, particularly when you expand the scale beyond one octave, or change keys.
But anyway, back to solmization: A few of these pentatonic music systems are
While the ancient pentatonic scale is traditional in China, they also have a system for a full "modern" 12 note chromatic scale. These lu syllables in Chinese use the name of a bell for each chromatic pitch, such as huang chung ("yellow bell") and ling chung ("forest bell"). Each name can be reduced to a syllable -- huang, ling, t'ai, etc. -- and while these names are primarily for reciting or singing as a melody is being learned, these syllables can be used to write down the notes of a melodic line (each appearing as a single Chinese character) and thus form a simple written pitch notation.
As far as I know, there is no wang chung in Chinese music, except perhaps
as a imported American CD from the 80's.
Copyright 2000
Matthew Blind and
Team Blues: Get-a-Clue 2000 Game Control