My kids were singing this today and it make me wonder, just where or how did these, uh, sounds I guess, come to be associated with the notes on a musical scale?
Are they meant to be a tool for teaching music? If C D E F G A B C was too complicated I could certainly see the point.
Any ideas?
Don’t know when and where they originated…but one advantage of the syllables is that that system is a good deal more general than C D E F G A B C. That’s simply the C major scale. If you’re singing in another key then you get a different sequence. In B-flat it’s B-flat, C, D, E-flat, F, G, A, B-flat again.
The syllables are moveable and apply to any key equally easily. Nice if you’re transposing from one key to another, or if you’re learning intervals for sight singing or ear training (sit up, ear; roll over and beg, ear), or if you’re analyzing music without reference to the specific key.
As cited by RM Mentock in a previous thread on this subject:
Originally the first note was “ut”, and after “la” came “si”, not “ti”.
This is why (checking his 2 letter cheat sheet) you can use UT as a word in Scrabble.
These vocal syllables for note names are collectively called the solfeggio and are said to have been invented by the Benedictine monk Guido d’Arrezzo almost a thousand years ago.
The names do/ut, re, mi, etc. didn’t refer to specific notes but rather the positions of notes in whatever scale you were using at the moment. Do of course was the first step, re the second, and so on.
Just when you thought it couldn’t get more confusing, the solfeggio also has names for the half-steps between the notes of the scale, when you started working with minor keys, and those names depended on whether you were going up or down the scale. Grab a seat in front of the piano and sing along! Starting from middle C, going up, hitting every key along the way.
do, di, re, ri, mi, fa, fi, so, si, la, li, ti, do
Doing the same thing, going down from C above middle C:
do, ti, te, la, le, so, se, fa, mi, me, re, ra, do
Thanks to http://www.encyclopedia.com and Contemporary Music Theory, Level Two by Mark Harrison for the preceding information.