tlhIngan-Hol Archive: Fri Jun 10 01:04:45 1994
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solfeggio (was Re: Bad To The Bone)
- From: James Jones <[email protected]>
- Subject: solfeggio (was Re: Bad To The Bone)
- Date: Fri, 10 Jun 1994 11:59:42 -0500
- In-Reply-To: Your message of "Fri, 10 Jun 1994 12:29:26 EDT." <[email protected]>
>{do re mi fa so la ti do} come from Italian. Does anyone know what these
>stand for.
Actually, they're from Latin. The famous Guido d'Arezzo noticed that the
first notes of each phrase of "Ut queant laxis" started on successive notes
of the scale, and decided to use the corresponding syllables of the lyrics
to correspond to the notes rather than the names of the notes (C, D, E, etc.).
Or, in programming terms, he invented position-independent code.
("Ut" was changed to "do" later on, because it would sound funny for
Julie Andrews to sing "Ut, a deer, a female deer..." :-)
Anyone out there familiar with temperaments know whether nine or twenty-
seven is a particularly useful number of pieces to chop the "octave" up
into?
James Jones
No organization with which I'm associated has any opinion on Guido d'Arezzo,
as far as I know.