Aaaaargh

[lady_karelia]

So, the hymn of St John the Baptist... Ut Re Mi Fa So La, yeah, that one. The sheet music is on wikipedia, and it clearly shows ut as c, re as d, mi as e, etc. Makes perfect sense. Until I came across the Solfeggio frequencies, which are based on the hymn. 396 hz? That's not ut, that's close to today's g (392hz). And lo and behold, Horowitz in his Healing Codes for the Biological Apocalypse lists them as 396 = g. It kind of makes sense, but boy, did it take me some thinking. He mentioned on one occasion that the combination of mi and sol is destructive, and my first thought was, what a fuckwit. I mean, seriously, e and g as destructive??? Get rid of all the classical compositions then. *snrk* But nooooooo, that's not at all what he meant. C followed by the next higher f-sharp. Yeah, definitely destructive. But hell, how am I gonna figure out how C moved to G??? *iz lost* Cuz I'm sure I'm missing something. C4 is pretty close to Mozarts idea of 256 (258), A440 is of course utterly out of place, but then, yeah, no surprise there. Anyone can shed any light on this transformation from ut=c to ut=g? Cuz, really, I'm utterly lost.

Comments

[grrangerous.livejournal.com]

Hey there, I just got your message and clicked on your journal. I think this might be a question I can answer: when they first invented the solfege system, with my man Guido d'Arezzo and his hand, you could put the ut in one of several positions. The thing was, the lowest note they could notate was called Gamma (and the highest was an "ut", hence the word gamut meaning the full range, which is a contraction of Gamma-ut), but you will notice that the syllables they originally had, ut re mi fa so la, don't cover the whole octave and only contain one semitone (between mi and fa). Thus, a major part of learning the method was about fitting the right syllables to the right parts of the chant. "Ut" was never a specific pitch, not even a specific notated pitch (because what they called "A" for example, varied by as much as a major third within Italy alone), and even within one piece, ut could appear as several different pitches. (Once modality was replaced by tonality, the system changed, and someone invented "ti" and also a whole variety of ways to inflect a tonal solfa system to account for accidentals.)

If you want to learn how to sing Guido's solfa, there are various sources that are helpful, not least the picture of the guidonian hand.

I don't know whether that was all stuff you already knew, or, on the contrary, completely incomprehensible . . . ?

ps. I'm delighted to have been friended! :)