How were the notes born?

It happened in a small Italian town called Arezzo, where there once lived a monk named Guido. Guido did not like the alphabetical names of the music notes. Indeed, nobody would like the fact that different sounds are written as one line and the duration of the sounds cannot be easily determined.

Guido was a genius. His idea was simple but straight forward: he invented lines. First, there were only four of them and they were colored differently for better recognition. At the time Guido was a conductor of a small church choir. Since the range of the human voice is rather moderate, Guido did well with the four line music staff. Nowadays we use at least ten lines, so that we can better represent the piano range or even hundreds of lines for orchestra notes. The human voice did not need that many lines, so Guido started with four. His next thought was about the names of the notes. He found help in a prayer.

The biggest problem of the monastery choir was the hoarseness of the monks' voices. While singing at weddings and funerals, the monks highly cherished the clarity of the voice and tried to sing both the Gregorian chants and the madrigals in honor of the Virgin Mary as clearly as possible. That is the reason for the enormous popularity of a prayer to St. John in which the monks asked St. John to get rid of the hoarseness of the voice. The prayer was sung in Latin. Each of its phrases would start with the next higher note, like this - Ut, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La. Guido based his note name system on these syllables, thus attributing to each note a name better suited for the human voice. ALMOST better suited. "Ut" sounded too coarse for the musically sophisticated Italians and was soon transformed to a more convenient "Do". Where did the Si come from? (Si is called Ti in the United States for the sake of clarity, so that C and Si would not be confused.) Si is an abbreviation of the name Saint Loannus, the prayer which has become the basis for the Solfeggio music system.

This new system, invented by Guido in the 15th century, grew extremely popular in Europe, and America. Gradually, people have forgotten the name of the inventor. However, the saddest thing is that we seem to have also forgotten the importance of the audio-vocal perception of music. While the meticulous Italians hurried to switch the inconvenient UT with a more musical DO, our modern music teachers, being the holders of Bachelor's and Master's degrees in Music, do not hesitate to use the impossible for vocalization syllables of C, D, E, F, (!) G (!), A, B. Not only do they not think that they harm children, they also claim that the alphabetical system is ESSENTIAL in learning music, since children cannot learn music notes until they learn to read.

Many ancient philosophical texts advocate the importance of starting the child's education with music. These texts tell us about the role that music plays in the formation of the child's mentality, soul, and even the body itself. In contrast, modern musical pedagogy lets us teach music to children only after they learn the letters - letters which are NOT connected to music! And this method has been practiced for several centuries! How striking is the ignorance of generations?! How can we talk about the progress of musical development when professional musicians are consciously annihilating all sprouts of understanding the language of music?

I want you to know that teaching your children music using the alphabetical method is BAD for your children's musical development. I want you to let your music teacher know this. Do not hesitate to make the music professionals broaden their horizons in music education methodology. It is better than closing your child's gateway into the wonderful world of music.

© Hellene Hiner, 2004
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