Tomorrow is the feast of St. John the Baptist.
A medieval hymn used for the vespers services of the day (actually the preceding evening) is called
Ut queant laxis–the first stanza reads in English:
O for thy Spirit, Holy John, to chasten,
Lips sin-polluted, fettered tongues to loosen,
So by thy children might thy deeds of wonder
Meetly be chaunted
The melody was fairly well known as well:
If you take a look, the highlighted notes which begin each phrase are the notes of the C major scale in ascending order (the white keys on the piano–the most basic scale that almost everyone learns about if they learn anything about music). In the middle ages, there were no major or minor scales, but the C major scale was, under other names, a very basic piece of musical theory. So someone–traditionally, an important writer named Guido of Arezzo–got the idea of identifying the notes by the syllables which started each of these phrases from the hymn–Ut Re Mi Fa Sol La (but not Ti, or what we would call the note B natural, which came a little later). At some point, “Ut” was replaced by “Do”, and the system remained in use even after music had advanced well beyond the modes of medieval music.
And that’s how we got Julie Andrews singing in The Sound of Music.
However, if you feel like being medieval, here’s the full hymn in square note form (the sort of musical notation used for Gregorian chant), courtesy of The Topmost Apple.
Tags: music, music history, St. John the Baptist
