2016.07.05
The use of a seven-note diatonic musical scale is ancient, though originally it was played in descending order.
In the eleventh century, the music theorist Guido of Arezzo developed a six-note ascending scale that went as follows: ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la, and named the Aretinian syllables after him. A seventh note, "si" was added shortly after.[7] The names were taken from the first verse of the Latin hymn Ut queant laxis, where the syllables fall on their corresponding scale degree.
Ut queant laxis resonare fibris
Mira gestorum famuli tuorum,
Solve polluti labii reatum,
Sancte Iohannes.
The words of the hymn (The Hymn of St. John) were written by Paulus Diaconus in the 8th century. It translates[8] as:
So that these your servants can, with all their voice, sing your wonderful feats, clean the blemish of our spotted lips, O Saint John!
"Ut" was changed in the 1600s in Italy to the open syllable Do,[9] at the suggestion of the musicologue Giovanni Battista Doni, and Si (from the initials for "Sancte Iohannes") 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.[10] "Ti" is used in tonic sol-fa and in the song "Do-Re-Mi".
In England during the Elizabethan era a simplified version of this system (using only the syllables "fa", "sol", "la" and "mi") was used (see below Solmization in Elizabethan England).