A great series and a historical missed opportunity

By Brian Clegg

I have recently discovered and, so far, loved the BBC Radio 3 series Key Changes (available to non-radio listeners like me on BBC Sounds). It’s a major series giving a history of ‘classical’ music (not the classical period, but essentially non-popular/folk music). 

The series begins with 1026 and an amazing development 1,000 years ago, which transformed music in Europe and later worldwide: musical notation, enabling music to be passed on safely through the generations rather than riskily by ear.

What I particularly like is that though each episode is tied to a particular date and sometimes location – so the third episode, for example, is ’1182: Raising Notre-Dame’ there is still variety inspired by the theme. So here, for instance, as well as the music of the period, when polyphony was first introduced, we get more recent music linked to cathedrals, including Monteverdi, Howells and McDowall (plus Widor’s Toccata to demonstrate what a cathedral organ can do).

Linked to the introduction of sheet music was the birth of the system that would become known as tonic sol-fa (sol being an alternative to so) – the ‘do re me…’ approach familiar to all if only from The Sound of Music. I confess, if I ever knew, I had forgotten that this was invented alongside the notation using a sort of musical mnemonic based on the opening syllables of an eighth century Latin hymn, which conveniently started each phrase with a note in the major scale. The words went:

Ut queant laxis resonare fibras mira gestorum famuli tuorum solve pollute labii reatum sancte Ioannes.

You’ll notice that ‘te’ is missing – it seems to have started from ‘si’ from the initials of ‘sancte Ioannes’ and been modified to ‘ti’ and then ‘te’ (though confusingly using the pronunciation of ‘ti’). This is sometimes attributed to a combination of Miss S. A. Glover and Reverend John Curwen in the mid-nineteenth century to avoid there being two ‘s’ notes, meaning tonic sol-fa could be written out using single initial letters.

But there’s also the matter of ‘do’ mysteriously replacing ‘ut’. It seems that around the seventeenth century they got fed up with what’s not a very nice singing sound and replaced it with ‘do’, probably from ‘dominus’. Fair enough. But surely they missed a great opportunity. 

Part of good singing involves having suitable vowels – in singing Latin, for centuries the Italian vowel sounds have been used. It’s helpful to practice these to get a good sound. But there is one vowel missing from the ‘do re me…’ sequence. There is no ‘u’. All they needed to do was reverse ‘ut’ to get ‘tu’ – a perfectly good Latin word. We really should be using ‘tu re me….’

Image from Unsplash by Yumu showing the original four line notation still used for plainchant. 

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Now Appearing is the blog of science writer Brian Clegg (www.brianclegg.net), author of Inflight Science, Before the Big Bang and The God Effect.