pronouncing sol?
  • tdunbar
    Posts: 120
    Scott Turkington mentioned, in passing, that there was a reason to say "sol" rather than "so" in solfege but he never got back to the reason.
  • David Sullivan
    Posts: 355
    Oh, I thought he did answer it, at least implicitly, by introducing the hymn Ut quaeant laxis, and stating that the solfege syllables aren't just nonsense syllables, but came from this source. Hence sol --as in the line in the hymn: 'SOL-ve polluti, LA-bii reatum. But maybe I saw that because I already knew the "rest of the story."
  • tdunbar
    Posts: 120
    yes, but if that was all that was intended, I misunderstood. I supposed there was some musical reason to prefer "sol" to "so" since Scott mentioned that in his schola they intentionally say the 'l'.
  • jgirodjgirod
    Posts: 45
    There might be an additional reason, but I am not sure it concerns sol. The Justine Ward method, starting from book 3, starts using variants names for notes with a sharp or a flat: for instance, ti flat is called teh in the Gregorian Chant Practicum and in the old french edition of book 3 fa sharp is called fe.
  • Elizabeth Poel
    Posts: 44
    David Sullivan is correct. "The Note-Names of the Tonic SOL-FA system are derived from a hymn in the Latin language, Ut Queant Laxis, sung on the Feast of St. John the Baptist on June 24th. For this reason the pronunciation of Note-Names is in Latin." (Gregorian Chant Practicum: Based on Music Fourth Year - Gregorian Chant by Justine Bayard Ward. Prepared by Theodore Marier and an International Committee of Ward Method Teachers. Washington DC: The Catholic University of American Press, 1990.)
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