Evening Republican, Volume 22, Number 165, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 15 July 1919 — Music and Thinking: [ARTICLE]

Music and Thinking:

About 1000 A. D. a monk in an Italian monastery had been thinking about the long, laborious task of training singers for the church service. Ten years were required for a singer to memorise words and music of the various chants and hymns used! There was no system for learning a new tune Independent of the words. And while he was thinking he heard his choirboys practicing one of their lessons, a hymn that rose in pitch with the first syllable of each successive line, just as the scale series was formed. Thought flashed! And the result of his thinking was the use of the syllables ut (changed to do later), re, mi, fa, soj, la, si to facilitate scale learning. The immediate result was that Guido’s choirboys learned al I their tunes —and could take pew ones —in six months as against ten years in the old way. And the indirect result is that boys and girls in the schools of this country learn the scales by a process similar to that thought out by a monk in Italy nearly 1,000 years ago.