Solmization and the Guidonian hand — questions
  • MatthewRoth
    Posts: 2,263
    I basically adhere to, and would teach, solfège going from Do to Si/Ti and therefore "back to Do" like pretty much all of us do. In fact, I'm going to use this observation from @chonak:
    A melody in the major scale has certain relationships between the notes, and it gives us a sense of closure when it ends at 'do'.

    If a melody ends at 're', those relationships are shifted; and the sense we experience at the end is different: not quite closure, but a kind of openness.


    However, I've become interested in the pre-modern way of solmization, thanks to what @Charles_Weaver has mentioned, in a comment noting that Fontgombault is said to change the bass note when you'd need to mutate hexachord and not just on an ictic note (with the caveat that they're flexible about this). This led me to his articles on solmization on Corpus Christi Watershed both are linked here).

    I found this video from Early Music Sources to be really helpful. I can work with the natural and hard hexachords, but I still have some questions:

    1. How does it work when we get below Do/Ut (based on the clef's position)? It's true that for chant, there are not a lot of chants which do this; mode II often has a characteristic low La — or rather Re, if we stick to the Guidonian hand — but the Si/Mi tends to be skipped so the half-step central to this way of teaching is only in the mind.

    Anyway, what note is the note to switch on in these cases? I understand that you switch at A when working with the natural and hard hexachords going up and then down, but the note to switch on isn't obvious when descending: in the tract Confitemini, you have, in the very first word, Re-Ut-Re. So do we sing Ut or Fa going down, at c? I presume that on the first torculus of -ni, it's back to Ut. In a mode 2 antiphon like O Doctor Optime, you sing Re-Re, so there's no overlap, and the problem doesn't come up.

    Then, more curiously, the introit Dicit Dominus has a flat in our editions, but the charts available online don't present this flat, and we have the Si-flat (Fa, for Guido) above upper La. But how would one teach this lower flat with the hand?

    2. I'm not understanding what syllable name to use on the note before the note which is above the range of the (natural) hexachord. That is, in the exercises that Dr. Weaver drew up (available from the article), you sing the natural hexachord going up to La, then you go down a whole step, singing Ut "again" to get the hard/G hexachord. Or you sing Sol, then Re, and coming down, Mi then La. Easy enough.

    But with the soft hexachord beginning on F: it looks like the fourth Fa-Fa suffices, as in exercises 7, 8, and 9; Fa ut is not really needed, so I seem to be not grasping something. The same observation occurs in the final verse of the tract Confitemini; you have Sol, then the Si-flat (Fa): the mutation is just for the flat, unless I'm misunderstanding.
  • A big topic, and I wish I had been keeping up with blogging about this, since I've been doing a lot of practice in this area in the last couple of years. I'm especially on fire about it because it is how Haydn would have learned solfège, and there's also some evidence that Bach was in favor of this system. Of course I often teach modern solfège too, but I'm really enjoying getting into this historical practice. To your questions:

    1a. In general, one wants to switch onto Re going up and onto La going down no matter where you are in the hand and which scale you are doing. This is widely documented over many centuries. Singing one octave of the C major scale is DRMFSRMF going up and FMLSFMRD going down. If you keep going down, you try to switch onto La. In other words, the whole hand from G at the bottom of the bass staff up to E at the top of the violin staff goes like this, if you are using B natural: DRMFRMFSRMFRMFSRMFSL and down is LSFMLSFLSFMLSFLSFMRD. Notice that on the way down, only B=mi, which makes it especially significant. There are symmetrical FSL groups above and below. The same thing is true of G=sol on the way up, with RMF above and below. Interestingly, Do ends up getting used very little, which is part of the reason why it disappeared in English methods as well as in shapenote singing. Essentially, shapenote (four-syllable solfège) adopts the traditional way of singing the scale down, so there is only la, sol, fa, and mi.

    1b. In practice, there is always a little bit of a grey area when singing with the syllables. The D at the bass of the middle fingers just is both Re and Sol. Sometimes you can justify singing one or the other. Usually what happens in my class is we agree on a point to switch, sometimes governed by phrases or groupings, but if we are singing something at sight there might be a few notes where both syllables are actually heard. I don't think this is a huge deal.

    If you take my grouping idea, then the tract Domine Exaudi would start SFSFRFSFSSFRMFMFFMFRMFMFR. One could chose a different point for that first mutation.

    In your example, Confitemini, you would actually just start on Sol, and there's no reason to mutate until "Domino." So: SSSFSFRFSFSLSFSFSLS // DRFMF etc.

    1c. Dicit Dominus indeed uses the flat. Since this note is not in the hand, it is not musica vera; not part of the gamut. Instead, it's "made up" or musica ficta, by analogy with the B-fa of the higher octave. In practice, one sings Fa for all flats, including this B-flat. In singing this passage, you have to decide whether you want to have a whole fictitious hexachord on low F, so the chant starts LLFSRDFF, or whether you want to highlight that that note is not in the true scale but is a fa subbing for a mi, so the chant starts SSFFRDFF. You could probably find historical evidence for both practices in a case like this.

    2. There is an old adage "una nota super la semper est canendum fa." If you only need the note a half step above the top of the hexachord, one can just borrow without actually switching hexachords. The last verse of Confitemini could start like this: FSLSSSLSLFSF.

    Well, there's a lot more to say, but hopefully that is helpful.
    Thanked by 1MatthewRoth
  • MatthewRoth
    Posts: 2,263
    Yes, that’s very helpful; it obviously takes some practice, particularly in the melismatic chants like these tracts. Using Sol at the first note feels more foreign than using only six notes. But now it feels like it’s clicking. I’m glad to have another tool in the toolbox.

    Luckily for me, singing Roman Vespers means that I’ll have fa super la to work with a fair amount. :) But now this adage makes practical sense.
  • MatthewRoth
    Posts: 2,263
    A great video. I can only dream of doing this with such ease.

    Re: the flat below the staff, I recalled the Subvenite as well. Both options of singing the Fa that otherwise isn’t there make sense even if my fingers aren’t quite there.
  • Dr. Mahrt sings so beautifully! Thank you for the video.

    One really great thing about the old solfège is that it orients you toward the central half step (mi-fa), which is really the crucial and mode-defining part of the scale. Whatever hexachord you are in sort of puts you in the orbit of that particular point in the scale.

    This idea of the half step being crucial extends to the clef notes, which are the key (“clef”) to the scale precisely because they are situated above the half steps. Even the b-flat sign was often considered a kind of clef historically, since it too signals where a fa is.

    When you change hexachords, you also change which half step you are closest to. There is part of your mind that is calculating intervals around this, and the hexachords really bring this thinking to the surface.

    One other advantage is that the transposed chants (e.g. mode 2 graduals) make a lot more sense because you see the relationship with the other clef.

    When the system was applied to sixteenth-century music, pretty much any flat became a fa, although sharpened notes to make good cadences (what we now call leading tones) didn’t (for most writers) change the solfège but were given the same syllable they would have had.

    The more I consider all these things, the more they make sense. Lots to think about.
    Thanked by 2DavidOLGC Nisi
  • MatthewRoth
    Posts: 2,263
    Today’s offertory, Meditabor, was also a good example of the transposition; I was thinking of this while I was singing, actually…
    Thanked by 1tomjaw
  • Yes, and if you did the verses, you would see that the clef changes but the mode does not, because the verse at the pitch in which the Vatican edition puts the first part would require a high f-sharp. Compare a more recent edition which puts the whole thing in an F clef with low B-flats.
    Thanked by 2MatthewRoth tomjaw