Solfège


In music, solfège or solfeggio, also called sol-fa, solfa, solfeo, among many names, is a music education method used to teach aural skills, pitch and sight-reading of Western music. Solfège is a form of solmization, and though the two terms are sometimes used interchangeably, this system originated from other "Eastern" music cultures such as swara, durar mufaṣṣalāt and Jianpu.
Syllables are assigned to the notes of the scale and enable the musician to audiate, or mentally hear, the pitches of a piece of music being seen for the first time and then to sing them aloud. Through the Renaissance various interlocking 4, 5 and 6-note systems were employed to cover the octave. The tonic sol-fa method popularized the seven syllables commonly used in English-speaking countries: do, re, mi, fa, so, la, and si.
There are two current ways of applying solfège: 1) [|fixed do], where the syllables are always tied to specific pitches [|movable do], where the syllables are assigned to scale degrees.

Etymology

"solfeggio" and English/French "solfège" derive from the names of two of the syllables used: sol and fa.
The generic term "solmization", referring to any system of denoting pitches of a musical scale by syllables, including those used in India and Japan as well as solfège, comes from French solmisation, from the Latin solfège syllables sol and mi.
The verb "to sol-fa" means to sing a passage in solfège.

Origin

In eleventh-century Italy, the music theorist Guido of Arezzo invented a notational system that named the six notes of the hexachord after the first syllable of each line of the Latin hymn Ut queant laxis, the "Hymn to St. John the Baptist", yielding ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la. Each successive line of this hymn begins on the next scale degree, so each note's name was the syllable sung at that pitch in this hymn.


Ut queant laxīs resonāre fībrīs
Mīra gestōrum famulī tuōrum,
Solve pollūtī labiī reātum,
Sancte Iōhannēs.


The words were written by Paulus Diaconus in the 8th century. They translate as:


So that your servants may, with loosened voices,
Resound the wonders of your deeds,
Clean the guilt from our stained lips,
O St. John.


"Ut" was changed in the 1600s in Italy to the open syllable Do, at the suggestion of the musicologue Giovanni Battista Doni, and Si was added to complete the diatonic scale. In Anglophone countries, "si" was changed to "ti" by Sarah Glover in the nineteenth century so that every syllable might begin with a different letter. "Ti" is used in tonic sol-fa.
An alternative theory argues that the solfège syllables derive from the syllables of an Arabic solmization system درر مفصّلات Durar Mufaṣṣalāt , mentioned in the works of Francisci a Mesgnien Meninski in 1680 and later discussed by Jean-Benjamin de La Borde in 1780. However, there is no documentary evidence for this theory.

In Elizabethan England

In the Elizabethan era, England and its related territories used only four of the syllables: mi, fa, sol, and la. "Mi" stood for modern si, "fa" for modern do or ut, "sol" for modern re, and "la" for modern mi. Then, fa, sol and la would be repeated to also stand for their modern counterparts, resulting in the scale being "fa, sol, la, fa, sol, la, mi, fa". The use of "fa", "sol" and "la" for two positions in the scale is a leftover from the Guidonian system of so-called "mutations". This system was largely eliminated by the 19th century, but is still used in some shape note systems, which give each of the four syllables "fa", "sol", "la", and "mi" a different shape.
An example of this type of solmization occurs in Shakespeare's King Lear, I, 2.

Modern use

Solfège is still used for sight reading training. In the U.S., traditional American country music was first recorded in the 1920s by solfège-trained singers, often too poor to afford a piano, who used sight reading as a way of making printed music into entertainment. Flanders Bays and "Singing Bob" Leonard were traveling music teachers who trained hundreds of students, among them The Carter Family, who recorded the first nationally distributed recordings of regional "country" music.
There are two main types of solfège: [|Movable do] and [|Fixed do].

Movable do solfège

In Movable do, or tonic sol-fa, each syllable corresponds to a scale degree. This is analogous to the Guidonian practice of giving each degree of the hexachord a solfège name, and is mostly used in Germanic countries, Commonwealth Countries, and the United States.
One particularly important variant of movable do, but differing in some respects from the system described below, was invented in the nineteenth century by Sarah Ann Glover, and is known as tonic sol-fa.
In Italy, in 1972, Roberto Goitre wrote the famous method "Cantar leggendo", which has come to be used for choruses and for music for young children.
The pedagogical advantage of the movable-Do system is its ability to assist in the theoretical understanding of music; because a tonic is established and then sung in comparison to, the student infers melodic and chordal implications through his or her singing. Thus, while fixed-do is more applicable to instrumentalists, movable-do is more applicable to theorists and, arguably, composers.

Major

Movable do is frequently employed in Australia, China, Japan, Ireland, the United Kingdom, the United States, Hong Kong, and English-speaking Canada. The movable do system is a fundamental element of the Kodály method used primarily in Hungary, but with a dedicated following worldwide. In the movable do system, each solfège syllable corresponds not to a pitch, but to a scale degree: The first degree of a major scale is always sung as "do", the second as "re", etc. In movable do, a given tune is therefore always sol-faed on the same syllables, no matter what key it is in.
The solfège syllables used for movable do differ slightly from those used for fixed do, because the English variant of the basic syllables is usually used, and chromatically altered syllables are usually included as well.
Major scale degreeMova. do solfège syllable# of half steps from Do
1Do0
Raised 1Di1
Lowered 2Ra1
2Re2
Raised 2Ri3
Lowered 3Me 3
3Mi4
4Fa5
Raised 4Fi6
Lowered 5Se6
5Sol7
Raised 5Si8
Lowered 6Le 8
6La9
Raised 6Li10
Lowered 7Te 10
7Ti11

If, at a certain point, the key of a piece modulates, then it is necessary to change the solfège syllables at that point. For example, if a piece begins in C major, then C is initially sung on "do", D on "re", etc. If, however, the piece then modulates to G major, then G is sung on "do", A on "re", etc., and C is then sung on "fa".

Minor

Passages in a minor key may be sol-faed in one of two ways in movable do: either starting on do, which is referred to as "do-based minor", or starting on la. The latter is sometimes preferred in choral singing, especially with children.
The choice of which system is used for minor makes a difference as to how you handle modulations. In the first case, when the key moves for example from C major to C minor the syllable do keeps pointing to the same note, namely C,, but when the key shifts from C major to A minor, the scale is transposed from do = C to do = A. In the second case, when the key moves from C major to A minor the syllable do continues to point to the same note, again C, but when the key moves from C major to C minor the scale is transposed from do = C to do = E-flat.
Natural minor scale degreeMovable do solfège syllable Movable do solfège syllable
Lowered 1Le
1LaDo
Raised 1LiDi
Lowered 2Te Ra
2TiRe
3DoMe
Raised 3DiMi
Lowered 4Ra
4ReFa
Raised 4RiFi
Lowered 5Me Se
5MiSol
6FaLe
Raised 6FiLa
Lowered 7Se
7SolTe
Raised 7SiTi

Fixed do solfège

In Fixed do, each syllable corresponds to the name of a note. This is analogous to the Romance system naming pitches after the solfège syllables, and is used in Romance and Slavic countries, among others, including Spanish-speaking countries.
In the major Romance and Slavic languages, the syllables Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, and
Si are used to name notes the same way that the letters C, D, E, F, G, A, and B are used to name notes in English. For native speakers of these languages, solfège is simply singing the names of the notes, omitting any modifiers such as "sharp" or "flat" in order to preserve the rhythm. This system is called fixed do and is used in Spain, Portugal, France, Italy, Belgium, Romania, Latin American countries and in French-speaking Canada as well as countries such as Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Russia, Serbia, Poland, Ukraine, Georgia, Bulgaria, Greece, Armenia, Albania, North Macedonia, Mongolia, Iran, Israel, the Arab world, Turkey, and Taiwan where non-Romance languages are spoken. In the United States, the fixed-do system is principally taught at The Juilliard School in New York City, the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, and the Cleveland Institute of Music in Cleveland, Ohio.
In the fixed do system, shown above, accidentals do not affect the syllables used. For example, C, C, and C are all sung with the syllable "do".

Chromatic variants

Several chromatic fixed-do Systems that have also been devised to account for chromatic notes are as follows:

Comparison of the two systems

Movable Do corresponds to our psychological experience of normal tunes. If the song is sung a tone higher it is still perceived to be the same song, and the notes have the same relationship to each other, but in a fixed Do all the note names would be different. A movable Do emphasizes the musicality of the tune as the psychological perception of the notes is always relative to a key for the vast majority of people that do not have absolute pitch.
Sotorrio argues that fixed-do is preferable for serious musicians, as music involving complex modulations and vague tonality is often too ambiguous with regard to key for any movable system. That is, without a prior analysis of the music, any movable-do system would inevitably need to be used like a fixed-do system anyway, thus causing confusion. With fixed-do, the musician learns to regard any syllable as the tonic, which does not force them to make an analysis as to which note is the tonic when ambiguity occurs. Instead, with fixed-do the musician will already be practiced in thinking in multiple/undetermined tonalities using the corresponding syllables.
In comparison to the movable do system, which draws on short-term relative pitch skills involving comparison to a pitch identified as the tonic of the particular piece being performed, fixed do develops long-term relative pitch skills involving comparison to a pitch defined independently of its role in the piece, a practice closer to the definition of each note in absolute terms as found in absolute pitch. The question of which system to use is a controversial subject among music educators in schools in the United States. While movable do is easier to teach and learn, some feel that fixed do leads to stronger sight-reading and better ear training because students learn the relationships between specific pitches as defined independently, rather than only the function of intervals within melodic lines, chords, and chord progressions.
If a performer has been trained using fixed do, particularly in those rare cases in which the performer has absolute pitch or well-developed long-term relative pitch, the performer may have difficulty playing music scored for transposing instruments: Because the "concert pitch" note to be performed differs from the note written in the sheet music, the performer may experience cognitive dissonance when having to read one note and play another. Especially in the early stages of learning a piece, when the performer has yet to gain familiarity with the melodic line of the piece as expressed in relative terms, it may be necessary to mentally re-transpose the sheet music in order to restore the notes to concert pitch.
Those trained in fixed-do will argue that their act is the analogue of reading aloud in a language. Just as one reads this very sentence without parsing it grammatically, so too fixed-do is the direct sounding of the music. Where the movable-do system requires constant real-time analysis of the tonality and modulations in the score, in fixed-do the musician uses knowledge of the changing tonality to understand for example that the pitch class c-natural is the supertonic in B-Flat major or minor, and the dominant when the music modulates to F-major, but the c-note remains the same pitch.
Instrumentalists who begin sight-singing for the first time in college as music majors find movable do to be the system more consistent with the way they learned to read music.
For choirs, sight-singing fixed do using chromatic movable do syllables is more suitable than sight-singing movable do for reading atonal music, polytonal music, pandiatonic music, music that modulates or changes key often, or music in which the composer simply did not bother to write a key signature. It is not uncommon for this to be the case in modern or contemporary choral works.

Note names

In the countries with fixed-do, these seven syllables – rather than the letters C, D, E, F, G, A, and B – are used to name the notes of the C-Major scale. Here it would be said, for example, that Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is in "Re minor", and that its third movement is in "Si-bemol major".
In Germanic countries, on the other hand, it is the letters that are used for this purpose and the solfège syllables are encountered only in their use in sight-singing and ear training.

Other possibilities to denote solfège

Rainbow colors assigned by Isaac Newton

had associated the seven solfège syllables with the seven colors of the rainbow and surmised that each color vibrated accordingly. Thus, red has the least amount of vibration while violet vibrates the most.
PitchSolfègeColor
Cdo Red
DreOrange
EmiYellow
FfaGreen
Gsol Blue
AlaIndigo
AlaBlue violet
Bti/siPurple
Bti/siRed violet

Cultural references