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Writer's pictureJorden Herrington

Music Theory: Solfège



Solfege, also known as "Solfeggio" or "Solfa," is a music educational method designed to train aural skills, pitch, and sight reading for music. Each note of a scale is assigned a unique syllable. When put in practice, each musical note corresponds to Do, Re, Mi, Fa, So, La, Ti, Do.


Origins


The Solfege method began in Italy during the eleventh century with a music theorist named Guido of Arezzo. The theorist earned a reputation for his ability to teach troubadours chants and songs quickly. Until the creation of Solfege, plainsong chants were memorized or annotated in neumes. Neumes helped the troubadours remember basic structures of melodies but often needed more precision. To solve this problem, Guido composed a hymn to educate troubadours on how to recognize individual notes on a scale. Guido's "Ut Queant Laxis" would birth the solmization of music as a unique syllable introduced each new pitch. Guido introduced the notes as follows Ut, Re, Mi, Fa, So, La. Since his time, the note Do has replaced Ut, and Ti was added to the list of syllables to complete the modern Soflege method. Subsequently, theorists have applied Solfege in two ways in the contemporary era: Movable Do and Fixed Do.


Moveable Do


Many music theorists understand Movable Do as a tool for teaching a concept called relative pitch. In Movable Do, each syllable corresponds to a pitch, with the tonic or first degree of a scale being flexible depending on the scale used.

Moveable Do in various scales
Moveable Do in various scales

The system reminds listeners of the intervallic relationship or distance between the various pitches, which provides the user with a harmonic reference for any song. With the reference in mind, the user can recreate the piece, operating on the assumptions of the next pitch. This interpretation of the system would explain why the tonic is flexible.


Fixed Do


On the other hand, Fixed Do assumes a different approach regarding Solfege. The theory is that regardless of the scale, the C note will always remain the tonic or Do. The contrast between these two approaches is that Moveable Do's advantages benefit analysts and composers, while Fixed Do benefits conductors. From the conductor's perspective, leading various instruments, often in different keys, can propose a challenge. In the previously described situation, note naming becomes vital for the conductor's organization, as they focus on the synergy of instruments at the macro level. However, this interpretation exposes the limitations of Fixed Do. Fixed Do only accounts for the rudimentary compositional syntax, ignoring complex notes such as sharps, or flats, thus teaching its users the concept of perfect pitch. However, several chromatic Fixed Do variants were created to account for these limitations, such as the Hullah, Shearer, Siler, and Sotorrio methods.

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