A long, long way to run

Mr Andrew Pennay, Head of Curriculum Music

Each year, I am surprised by the number of younger students who have never seen the 1965 film adaptation of the musical The Sound of Music in which Julie Andrews famously rattles off the solfa syllables comprising a major scale (do re mi fa soh la ti do) with barely cursory explanation. Although the initial development of the solfa syllables is widely attributed to Guido d’Arezzo in medieval Italy, it is more likely that the syllables we use at Brisbane Girls Grammar School originated in the Arabian ‘Separated Pearls’, dāl, rā’, mīm, fā’, ṣād, lām, tā’ (Chami, 2014).

These notes form the basis of six years of curricular Music instruction here at Girls Grammar, in order that students come to know more of the function and emotion that individual notes possess. As such, solfa is supremely useful in sight-reading, composition, improvisation, musicological analysis and aural development. Going beyond ‘making music’ as performance, Christopher Small’s term ‘musicking’ (1998) gives credence to these other aspects of musicianship development, including rehearsal, practising, listening and dancing (p. 9). A few years earlier, and without the special ‘k’, David Elliott (1995) had suggested ‘musicing’ should acknowledge the importance of the critically reflective and co-dependent actions of performing-and-listening, improvising-and-listening, composing-and-listening, arranging-and-listening and conducting-and-listening in the classroom.

Elliott’s concept of musicianship as ‘the way the music goes’ through aural understanding lends itself to the use of relative solfa (changing do to always belong to the right key) as a learning tool. Let’s look at some practical examples of these notes to show you something of the function and emotion each one carries. Each example is hyperlinked to a YouTube clip of the excerpt.

Do
Let’s start at the very beginning (a very good place to start). In the major key, do feels like home and is understandably referred to as the ‘tonic’, underpinning most of the music we hear. Think of the satisfaction when Whitney Houston sings ‘And IIIIIIIIII will al-ways love yooooouuu!’ She means it. Beethoven means it in the very end of his Symphony No. 5, too. Despite beginning in a minor key and then exploring many keys over thirty minutes, the final forty seconds centre irrepressibly around do (1). The ever-insistent do also pops up in Megan Washington’s How to tame lions (look at her right hand on the keyboard and listen to the verse melody). Girls Grammar alumna Hannah Cameron also crafts her use of do to indicate home. Watch her right hand thumb for the first twenty seconds as she keeps returning home to do on the guitar. She then ventures kaleidoscopically before returning home aching at 2:01.

Re
In her famous Non, je ne regrette rien, Edith Piaf draws on re as the highest note in her melody to scoop above do. We hear the note most pleadingly at 01:45 (‘for me, it’s all the same!’). Re is even more delicious when used as a non-chordal tone, unexpected and colourful. Andrew Lloyd Webber capitalises on this more piquant re in Phantom of the Opera in the duet “All I ask of you”. The very first note of Raoul’s ‘No more talk of darkness’ is non-belonging and leads the listener on. Christine’s consequent ‘Say you love me’, two octaves higher, commences with three re tones to punctuate the pleading nature of the libretto (2).

Mi
Onwards and upwards to mi, the name Mimi ‘calls herself’ in Giacomo Puccini’s La Bohème. In the very last minute of this verismo opera, Rodolfo rushes to Mimi’s bed, realising she has died. ‘Mimi,’ he calls (coincidentally?) on a high mi. And again, ‘Mimi!’. Although we also hear mi as the first three declamatory notes of Beethoven’s  Symphony No. 5 (mi mi mi do!), gentler manifestations of mi present themselves in the first three melodic notes played by the little finger in Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata (from bar five with six G sharps in a row), and the very first note of the enchanting melody of Chopin’s Raindrop Prelude. It’s all about the context.

Fa
My favourite! Listen out for the third viola note (at 0:35) in Arvo Pärt’s Spiegel im Spiegel. The note is full of uncertainly, longing to return to the mi that precedes it. Fa is later employed as the highest note in this same melody at 8:28 before the tune slowly and gently glides down the scale over an octave to rest back at the mi we started the piece on. In a more contemporary context, fa is the highest note in Taylor Swift’s You belong with me (‘So, why can’t you see? You belong with me!’). In both works, fa yearns to drop a half-step down to the relative security of mi. In Swift’s work (co-written with Liz Rose), the lyrics are enhanced significantly as a result.

Soh
The jazz standard, One-note samba, commences with nine bars of a sung soh, as heard in Stacey Kent’s performance. This tone is much more stable than fa, and accordingly is referred to as the ‘dominant’. Closer to home, it is no coincidence that this one little pitch soh makes up five out of six notes of the opening phrase of our School song (Nil sine la-bore), the opening three notes of our School Hymn (Now thank we all our God), and three notes from the first phrase of our national anthem (Aus-tra-lians all let us re-joice). Soh is declamatory, indeed!

La
La forms the basis of another compositional universe. When used in place of do as the ‘tonic’ note, music takes on an entirely different character (it becomes minor). Let’s return to Arvo Pärt and observe his Fur Alina. The opening la in the left hand sets the tone for the work, followed by another la in the right hand played simultaneously with a ti then a do. It’s a simple technique but it can shake a listener to the core.

Ti
So much more than a drink with jam and bread, this ‘leading note’ tries desperately to return home to do or at least fall to la. Current Year 11 student Olivia Wong has it right when she pleads ‘Please Mis-ter Blue Moon, it’s dark tonight. Use your light to guide us home’. Congratulations to Olivia who was one of four finalists in the Queensland Music Awards last month for this song, which was composed, performed and recorded to CD as a Year 10 Music assignment last year.

Do
That will bring us back to do, exemplified by the very final violin note in Olivier Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time. Although this closing melody was used in an earlier organ work by Messiaen, its present incarnation was completed in Stalag VIII-A, a German World War II prisoner-of-war camp, and was premiered there, outside in the rain, in 1941 for forty fellow prisoners and guards. This very final note, a high do in E major, is transcendental and Messiaen himself noted this ‘slow ascent to the acutely extreme is the ascent of man to his god, the child of God to his Father, the being made divine towards Paradise’ (as cited in Tacet).

Footnotes

  1. Interestingly, Stefan Romanó (2009) suggests this big finish is a paraphrase of an older opera overture by Cherubini!
  2. More plagiarism! Snelson (2004) notes the uncanny similarity between Christine’s phrase and Giacomo Puccini’s La Fanciulla del West seventy-six years earlier.

References

Chami, H. (2014). Deconstructing a medieval legend: Guido D’arezzo, the ‘Arabian influence,’ and the role of ‘historical imagination’ (Master’s thesis, University of Florida). Retrieved from http://ufdcimages.uflib.ufl.edu/UF/E0/04/68/10/00001/CHAMI_H.pdf

Elliott, D. J. (1995). Music matters: A new philosophy of music education. New York: Oxford University Press.

Romanó, S. (2009). Ending the fifth: The myth that Beethoven did not know how to finish. The Beethoven Journal24 (2).

Small, C. (1998). Musicking: The meanings of performing and listening. Hanover: University Press of New England.

Snelson, J. (2004). Andrew Lloyd Webber. Yale, CT: Yale University Press.

Tacet. (2013, January 3). Quartet for the End of Time, Olivier Messiaen. [Web log post]. Retrieved from https://articulatesilences.wordpress.com/2013/01/03/quartet-for-the-end-of-time-olivier-messiaen