The Controversial History of Do-Re-Mi

music is an easy subject for legends. online  music communities abound with salacious rumors of their favorite star's over-the-top  antics, conspiracies about the hidden meanings and secret origins of songs, and  whispered tales of long-lost masterpieces

waiting to be rediscovered. and this is nothing  new: for as long as there's been a music press, there's been gossip, speculation, and wonder. but  if we go back far enough, the legends start to change. while modern legends tell unbelievable  stories about fundamentally human subjects,

as the weight of history begins to pile on their  shoulders, those characters transform from mere people into mythical figures, bringing  musical brilliance into the world like Prometheus carrying fire from the heavens. I want  to tell you one of those legends today, and then

I want to tell you why it scares me. this is the  story of Guido D'Arezzo. let's go back in time. (tick, tick, tick, tick, tock) before we get started, if you want  to see my next video a month early or just watch this one ad-free, those  are both live now on Patreon. there's

a link in the description, more  on that at the end of the video. ok, so, to be clear, Guido D'Arezzo did exist.  he was a real guy. we don't know a lot about his life, but we know he was a Benedictine monk  around the year 1000, we know he spent time at the

Abby of Pomposa, and we know that he eventually  moved to the Tuscan city of Arezzo. he may also have been born there. Guido was a musician and  teacher who developed what were, at the time, revolutionary musical ideas. some of these were  pretty specific to the styles of the day, but

he's also credited with an invention we still use  a full millenium later: solmisation, or solfege.

you may not know those names, but you've  definitely heard of this. solfege is the practice of associating the notes of a scale with  specific syllables so they're easier to remember.

specifically, these syllables: do, re, mi, fa,  sol, la, ti, do. I told you it'd be familiar. but back in Guido's day, this wasn't a thing.  no one did that, until Guido came along. but to understand how he got there, we have to  talk a bit about how music back then worked.

as a choir teacher, Guido was mainly concerned  with the labor-intensive task of teaching young boys to sing sacred hymns. and by this point,  the church had built up quite the repertoire: according to Kenneth Levy, cantors might be  expected to learn up to 80 hours of music. for

reference, that's about 4 times longer than  Bruce Springsteen's entire discography. and those chants were in latin, a language many of  them had not yet learned to read, or even speak.

this made teaching them really hard,  especially because the music notation of the time was not… great. the main technique  was the delightfully named neume, which were little symbols you'd put over the lyrics to  show the melodic contour of each syllable.