Guido

Let me tell you about a great guy named Guido. He invented a language that greatly lowered the barrier for new students to enter into his art. It was very difficult to learn a script in the old languages either because the syntax was so arcane or because you really needed someone to fill in missing details every time. Guido's language was intuitive and readable, and it made it possible to reproduce results with minimal training. And now, around a millennium later, it's hard to imagine music without the ubiquitous staff that Guido d'Arezzo first invented.

Guido was really interested in teaching. Prior to his staff notation, there wasn't a great way to indicate the pitch of a note. There were notations to indicate whether to go up or down by a lot or a little, but it wasn't particularly precise. He also invented mnemonics to help students learn. There's something called the Guidonian hand by which a student could use his knuckles to help remember his system. And of course, there's solfège.

"Do. A deer..." That whole do-re-mi business is solfège. It makes my head hurt. Do isn't a C or an A or any specific note. It's the base note of whatever key the song is in. A step up from there is re, a step up from there is mi, a half-step up from there is fa, and so on. If the key is C-major, do-re-mi-fa is CDEF. If it's D-major, it's DEF#G.

It gets worse. In a minor scale, do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti-do becomes do-re-me-fa-sol-le-te-do. In order to read a line and get the solfège right, one has to keep track of the particular key and mode. These often change in the middle of a piece. People who can sing solfège in real time freak me out.

I've been asking professional musicians when I get the chance what importance solfège had in their musical training. I'm still struggling to understand since no one seems to actually use it. My current suspicion is that it's a useful framework for illuminating music theory and the relations between notes. After all, a c-sharp and d-flat are not the same note, despite what a piano or guitar would have you believe. Solfège lays this fact bare along with other concepts. (I would love to chat with someone who teaches this stuff. hint hint)

Anyway, we can thank Guido for the names, do-re-mi-fa.... Actually, he called it ut-re-mi..., but it all started with him. He took the names from the hymn, Ut queant laxis, because each of the first six half-lines started with a different note. The starting syllables were assigned to those notes. Convenient. Thanks, Guido.

Also, Guido van Rossum (inventor of the python programming language) is pretty cool, too.