Tonic Sol-fa and Mass Sight-Singing

Curwen made solmization a movable notation, letting people without staff reading sing in parts.

Related

RomanticScale DegreeTonality

Staff notation asks you to name lines and spaces before you can measure an interval. Curwen took another road, marking scale degrees directly with do re mi, so anyone who knows where the tonic lies can begin to sing.

Time and place

Britain in the 1840s and 1850s, in London and Norwich. Sarah Ann Glover of Norwich devised her own sol-fa in the 1830s; the Congregational minister John Curwen rewrote it in the 1840s, settled on the name tonic sol-fa in the 1850s and began promoting it widely. Sources disagree on which year counts as the formal start.

What happened

The system used seven syllables, do re mi fa sol la ti, for scale degrees, with do moving to the tonic of whatever key was in use. The syllables were the degrees themselves, so no clef had to be read first. Curwen also turned rhythm into syllables, using dashes and commas for length, and printed the result as an independent notation that was cheaper to set than a staff. Textbooks were organised by class, teachers were trained to train others, and within weeks a group could sing in parts. In the later nineteenth century the method travelled with churches and missionaries to India, China, Africa and the Pacific, one of the earliest notation systems promoted across languages.

What changed

The threshold for reading music fell. Workers, children and women's choirs no longer needed years of instrumental training first. Cheap printing put a book in every hand, and the choral movement gained a mass base. It also provoked argument, since professional musicians feared that movable do would weaken absolute pitch and staff reading, a dispute that ran for decades in British music education. Kodaly later adopted movable do in Hungary, carrying the line into the twentieth century. Much of the movable-do teaching still used in schools traces back to Curwen.

Listen for the turn

Begin with the New Britain tune of Amazing Grace, mostly stepwise, so that singing it in sol-fa immediately shows where the tonic sits. Then Cwm Rhondda, whose short figure repeats and suits part-singing, the syllables telling each voice which degree it holds. Finally Hyfrydol, with few leaps and phrases closing on tonic or dominant, the shape a sight-singing book prefers. All three are hymns, the core repertoire of this method.

Related

This turn belongs to Romantic; see Scale Degree and Tonality.

Sources

• Grove Music Online, entry Tonic Sol-fa — Curwen and Glover checked, not quoted
• Bernarr Rainbow, The Land Without Music (Boydell Press) — English school music checked, not quoted

Used for fact-checking only; all prose is original.