Solmization , the practice of assign syllables to the different “ steps ” of the musical scale , start in ancient India . Fast forward a few thousand years to 6th - century Spain , when Isidore , the Archbishop of Seville , lamented that “ unless sound are remembered , they perish , for they can not be written down . ” A Benedictine monk named Guido d’Arezzo , who was also a original ofmusic , then began working on a system to prevent sacred line from being mislay to account .
D’Arezzo was familiar with solmisation , and noted that most of the Gregorian chants popular at that time could well be learn by singers if they could see the tone progress up and down the ordered series and associate it with thesound . He assigned the government note of the scale — C , D , E , F , G , A , B , C — a syllable : Do , Re , Mi , Fa , Sol , La , Ti , Do . Yes , it in reality issol : it ’s traditionally written that mode when the tonic note of hand are spell out , and often referred to informally as the Solfa or Solfège scale . That finalLis hard to hear because of thelathat come after .
Those were n’t just random sounds he chose . They came from “ Ut Queant Laxis , ” a well - known anthem in the Middle Ages that was chanted for vespers . Each bring home the bacon line of the song take up one tone higher than the previous one , so Guido used the first varsity letter of each word of each line : Utqueant laxis , Resonare fibris : Mire gestorum , Famuli tuorum : Solve , and so on . Utwas eventually view as too unmanageable pronounce and was changed todo .
Did Guido d’Arezzo ’s method acting work ? Well , asJulie Andrews(via Rodgers and Hammerstein ) put it inThe Sound of Music , “ When you know the note to babble out , you may sing most anything ! ”
A version of this chronicle was published in 2013 ; it has been update for 2023 .
