Jeanette Rowe, age 12, of Fredericksburg, Virginia, for her question:
Were the do, re, mi notes of the scale taken from longer words?
The female deer, the sunbeam and the name you call yourself are syllables taken from old Latin words, and the genius who thought of using them was a gentle choir master of Italy. He invented an easier way to teach singing and the do mi scale was part of his system.
Our musical scale dates back to ancient history but it had to grow and improve itself step by patient step. Notes are sounds, naturally, and sounds are vibrations. The higher or lower pitch of each note is a matter of its number of sound vibrations per second. The ro of pitch was figured out by a math wizard of ancient Greece. His name was Pythagoras and he lived more than 2,000 years ago. The people of those days had fine instruments and performed lots of fine popular music. Their ways for writing their notes were poor, and musicians depended mostly on hearing a tune and performing it by ear.
About 1830 years ago, further work was done on the scale by another math wizard, the famous astronomer Ptolemy of Alexandria. In the following centuries, musicians used a simplified form of our own scale and improved their ways of writing the notes. Choir singers of the 9th century had small marks called "neumes" above the words to show the notes that went with them. Finally, about 1,000 years ago, a brilliant music teacher took a critical look at the cumbersome old forms of music notation. He was the choir master of a Benedictine monastery in Italy, and we call him Guido of Arezzo.
His dedicated dream was to speed up the teaching of choral music. To do this, he saw that the singers needed to read written music as readily as they read written words. Guido invented the first musical staff. It had four lines separated by spaces and showed the notes on a ladder. He simplified the popular scale of six notes by giving them easy names. Our do mi scale stems from Guido's scale.
A good teacher links a new lesson to something his students already know. Guido's choir knew Latin hymns by heart. He noticed that a certain hymn to Saint John the Baptist was just right for a simplified music lesson. The first notes of the lines just happened to be the notes of the scale in the right order. He used the first syllable of each line to named note. Guido's easy learn scale was named with the Latin syllables, "ut la." Of these, only "ut" is a word in itself. All the others come from longer Latin words in the hymn. For instance, "re" is from "resonare," "fa" from "famuli" and "sol" from "solve." Guido's simplified scale was popular in this form for some 600 years. In the 17th century, Guido's "ut" was changed to "do" for Dominum. A seventh note named "si" was added to the ton of the ladder. But "si" sounded too much like Guido's "Sol, and in the 19th century it was changed to "ti." Later "Sol" lost a letter and became "so."
Hard consonants such as d and t are over in a moment. A singer does better with open mouthed vowels like o and e. He can hold words that end with these open sounds just as long as he can control his breathing. He has a chance to vary the volume of his voice, making it swell loud or dwindle softly away. All the original notes of Guido's scale except "ut" end in singable open sounds. Perhaps the great choir master knew this advantage. In any case it is one of the reasons why the do mi scale has endured through all these musical centuries