Italy

Where Did It Come From?

About a thousand years ago, there was an Italian monk named Guido who had a serious problem. He was in charge of the choir at his abbey, and was having a hard time helping the other monks learn new chants. Back then, music wasn’t written down like it is today, and the only thing Guido could do was sing a new melody over and over until the other monks got it. Guido wanted a faster way to teach new chants, so he decided to name the notes of the scale. He used a chant that began each line one note higher than the line before, and took the first syllable of each line, Ut, Re, Mi, Fa, So, and La. When he wanted to teach his choir a new chant, they would learn the notes using these syllables. It worked so well that Guido and his method became famous all over Italy. Over the centuries, Guido’s system of naming the tones of the scale evolved to the familiar Do, Re, Mi, Fa, So, La, Ti that Rogers and Hammerstein celebrated in “The Sound of Music.” This system of naming tones, called solfège, helps musicians develop a sense of the relationships between notes in a scale.