[wrholt]

Originally Posted by Don José

I would greatly appreciate corrections and suggestions on this text. I chose the topic after reading about it in another thread.

Firstly the musical notes used in Europe were just the first letters of the alphabet: A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H. In the Middle Ages, Guido de Arezzo, being an italian monk who also wrote about music theory, made up a new way of naming the notes. He used the Latin hymn below, and called the notes after the first syllable in each verse (except in the last one). Doing that, the new names were: Ut, re, mi , fa, sol, la, si.



Ut queant laxis,Resonare fibris,Mira gestorum,Famuli tuorum,Solve polluti,Labii reatum,Sancte Ioannes.

As this hymn was already sung by the monks, each syllable was sung using a different note. It's worth noting that the first note in the first verse was the note C, and the next notes were the ones coming after the one in the previous verse; so it wasn't a random proccess at all. The result is sohwn below:

Ut re mi fa sol la si
C D E F G A B
G A B C D E (see my comments below)

Long after that, the word 'ut' was substituted by 'do'. As far as I can remember, this was done because of the difficulty found when pronunciating 'ut' while singing.

In the aftermath, the new names were used in the countries whose languages were originated from latin, meanwhile other countries kept on using the 'old' names.

Nonetheless, I've heard that the syllable system is also used in some English speaking countries to learn how to read music. An example of this could be one of the songs that can be found in the soundtrack of the film 'The sound of music'. By the way, this film was curiously translated into Spanish as 'Sonrisas y lágrimas' (smiles and tears).


Similarly, the alphabet system is also well known by jazz musicians all over the world as jazz music sheets use it. In fact, not only do the jazz musicians know it, but also a lot of pop or rock musicians who study on books and websites writen in English.

Guido d'Arezzo original system used only 6 syllables, referred to has a hexachord. The first six lines start on successively higher notes, but the first note of line "Sancte Iohannes" starts lower than the preceding line.

This system was extended upward by a method of overlapping hexachords onto one another and identifying the notes by the names in each series of overlapping hexachords that covered the note. The lowest hexachord in the system set "ut" on G: this ut was called the "gamma ut": this evolved into the modern musical term "gamut" = the entire series of recognized notes.

The introduction of "si", derived from the initials of Sante Iohannes, to name the 7th note to complete an ut-to-ut scale came later. The changes from 'ut' to 'do' happened in Italy in about 1600 in order to have the name end in a vowel instead of a consonant. The change from "si" to "ti" in English-speaking countries in the 19th century was to have each syllable start with a different consonant sound.

Guido d'Arezzo's system evolved somewhat differently in England and its American colonies, where the post popular naming system used the syllables fa-sol-la-fa-sol-la-mi-fa up until a musical education reformation that started in the early 19th century led to the current almost total domination of do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti-do in the US. The English system was, and still is, used to teach sight singing, although these days it is used almost exclusively in the context of "shape-note singing" in the US. (Disclaimer: I'm a long-time participant in shape-note singing, particularly in the variant called Sacred Harp singing.)