Solfege's History
You may have heard the song “Do-Re-Mi” from the movie musical “The Sound of Music.” Many students say that this is their only experience with solfege syllables, which dates back many centuries. The syllables were developed by a medieval music theorist named Guido of Arezzo

Guido lived in the Italian city of Arezzo in the eleventh century, when Gregorian chant was widely sung in Christian churches across the western world. There was such an abundance of chant songs that singers could not remember all of them by heart. Guido noticed this and developed a system of solfege syllables to help singers learn how to read music. He even developed the Guidonian Hand, a mnemonic device that used the knuckles of the hand to represent the notes of the scale.

Who uses solfege?
Singers still use solfege today as a tool to assist with note reading and to establish a sense of tonality, or key center. A good way to think of key center is that it’s like “home base” – the notes of a song are organized around that home base, which we call “Do.”

Even if you haven’t studied much music theory, you probably understand this concept of tonality more than you realize. For instance, if you listen to this song, you can probably tell that it feels incomplete.

You’re probably humming the note that should come next. Because most of the music that we listen to is organized around a tonal center, we expect that it will return to home base, or Do.
You will see and hear more solfege as we progress through The Basics.