Solfege

Redirected from Sol-fa Solfege is a way of assigning syllables to names of the musical scale. In order, they are: Do, Re, Mi, Fa, Sol, La, Ti, and Do (for the octave). Solfege was a pedagogical technique created by Guido of Arezzo.

Etymology

"Solfege" came from French solfège in the 1910s. The French word in term came from the Italian solfeggio, which is a combination of sol and fa. Its equivalent since Early Modern English[?] is sol-fa.

The syllable names come from a formerly well-known medieval hymn, entitled Ut queant laxis, in which each successive verse starts on the next higher scale degree in the major scale; The first word in each verse corresponds to the solfege syllable, with the exception of "Do," which was "Ut" in the hymn.

Variations

There are two main types of solfege: moveable Do, in which each syllable corresponds with a scale degree, and fixed Do, in which the syllables correspond to fixed pitches. The advantage of moveable Do is that Do always corresponds to the tonic; the disadvantage is that the singer must do a harmonic analysis of the piece in order to sing the correct syllables. In fixed Do, the pitches are set: the tonic, Do, is C, Re is D, and so on; Fa is easy to remember, since it is F.

There are also other syllables corresponding to notes outside of the major scale. All the solfege syllables are listed in the table below; the syllables in the major scale are shown in bold.

Scale degree	Syllable	Mnemonic
Unison, Octave	Do	dough
Augmented unison	Di	Dee
Minor second	Ra	"Rah rah rah"
Major second	Re	ray
Augmented second	Ri	like reach
Minor third	Mé	May
Major third	Mi	like the word me
Perfect fourth	Fa	'a' as in father
Augmented fourth	Fi	like feet
Diminished fifth	Se	say
Perfect fifth	Sol	long 'o', like sold
Augmneted fifth	Si	see
Minor sixth	Le	lay
Major sixth	La	'a' as in large (like Fa, above)
Augmented sixth	Li	like lean
Minor seventh	Te	like take
Major seventh	Ti	tea

In colloquial language, singers sometimes use "solfege" and "sight reading" as synonyms, though sight reading[?] can also mean reading the piece without benefit of previous study, or numerical sight-singing, where the hard-to-memorize solfege syllables are replaced by the numbers one through seven.