The Mystery of Do-Re-Mi

Christopher Gabbitas - baritone
David Miller - lute

The Sunday Times, February 2007

Julie Andrews frolicked across the Alps singing it in The Sound of Music and generations of children have learnt their musical scales by remembering it. Now Do-Re-Mi has been traced back more than 2000 years to one of the greatest poets of ancient Rome.

According to a book to be published next month, the origins of the song lie far from the female deer and ray of golden sun in the Rodgers and Hammerstein version sung by Andrews to the von Trapp children. Instead it was penned as a mnemonic by a medieval Italian monk who drew on a melody which accompanied Horace's Ode to Phyllis.

The research has been carried out by Stuart Lyons, who won a classics scholarship to King's College, Cambridge. "The monk who invented Do-Re-Mi told a lie about it because he didn't want to go to the stake (for heresy)," Lyons said.

"The melody truly belonged to the Ode," said Lyons. "It is the most exciting thing that has ever happened to me in academic discovery. It is incredible to solve a mystery that is 1,000 years old. "

Professor Andrew Wallace-Hadrill 
Director, British School at Rome

"With brilliant detective work, Stuart Lyons unravels the musical character of Horace's odes and trraces a remarkable link between Horatian music, Guido d'Arezzo and the discovery of do-re-mi."

Musical Opinion, July/ August 2007

Combining scholarship with a gripping sense of narrative, this unprepossessing but worthwhile new book brings forward convincing evidence that the 11th-Century choirmaster Guido d'Arezzo did not so much invent the "do-re-mi" system as appropriate it from the Ode to Phyllis, written by Horace in the second decade BC.

Former Senior Classics Scholar at King's College, Cambridge, Stuart Lyons has previously published elegant, lively translations of Horace's Odes. Now, having concluded that the great Roman poet was also a musician and entertainer, Lyons argues convincingly that these Odes were in fact set to music. His researches led him to Montpellier and an old Carolingian manuscript which had been studied by d'Arezzo.

With hints that d'Arezzo would have run the risk of torture and death had he revealed a secular source for his teaching method, Lyons narrates a tale of cover-up which can almost sit alongside The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail and The Name of the Rose.

The volume contains revised verse translations of the Odes, as well as a transcription of the Ode to Phyllis' musical setting. A fascinating and highly recommended CD of the Ode's first performance in modern times, performed by King's Singer Christopher Gabbitas and lutenist David Miller, is also available from Signum Records on SIGCD 098. 

Christopher Morley

MusicWeb, September 2007

If you have noticed the playing time above 'eight minutes thirty four seconds' you will have hazarded a guess that this is not a run-of-the-mill CD. And given that, alongside the short playing time, the purely auditory pleasures to be derived from it are less than wholly exceptional, one may be tempted to dismiss the disc rather peremptorily. To do so would be wrong; there are other things of profound interest and suggestiveness here. The CD exists to illustrate a thesis argued by Stuart Lyons in his book Horace's Odes and the Mystery of Do-Re-Mi (Oxbow Books http://www.oxbowbooks.com/bookinfo.cfm/ID/46784). I haven't, I regret, read Lyon's book although I have read and admired his earlier translation of the odes of Horace, and listening to this disc makes me want to read the new book. My understanding is that Lyons' new book puts its stress on the idea that Horace was as much as much a musician and songwriter as a poet pure and simple and that, as such, he was important in the creation of a Latin equivalent to the earlier modes of Greek lyric song. This proposition is then related to a seemingly rather startling speculation: that when Guido d'Arezzo, in the eleventh century, invented the stave and the do-re-mi system of solmization (originally known as ut-re-mi rather than the modern do-re-mi) his real source was not the eighth-century hymn by Paul the Deacon, in praise of St. John the Baptist, the first six half lines of which provided the famous mnemonic:

Ut queant laxis resonare fibris
mira gestorum famuli tuorum,
solve polluti labii reatum,
sancta Iohannes!

Rather, suggests Lyons, Guido d'Arezzo was actually drawing on a setting of Horace's Ad Phyllidem (Odes, Book 4.9), which survives in a tenth-century Carolingian manuscript, now preserved in Montpellier. Lyons believes that it was this melody that Guido drew on. Not having read Lyon's book I don't know whether he argues that the manuscript preserves a melody that survives from Horace's own time or, more likely, that it was a later creation. Either way, the Montpellier codex certainly preserves one of the earliest surviving settings of a Horatian ode. Guido was, Lyons suggests, attracted to the melody of the setting because, after an initial middle C, each of the five succeeding half lines begins one note higher than the one before. What we are offered on the CD is, first, a realisation (by Lyons and Iain Kerr) of the Montpellier setting of Horace; second, a performance of Lyon's translation of the ode in a musical setting based on the Montpellier manuscript, though necessarily somewhat adapted; and, finally, the first verse of the eighth-century hymn in plainchant. Pleasantly performed by Christopher Gabbitas- of the King's Singers - and the excellent lutenist David Miller, the results are pleasant and intriguing listening. As it happens, Arezzo is one of my favourite places in Italy. Walk up the hill from the railway station towards the historic centre and you meet a statue of Guido; since the Horatian ode here sung was probably a kind of birthday poem for his patron Maecenas, and since Maecenas's family had their background in Arezzo there is an attractive circularity to the ideas and materials presented here. In truth, however, the CD will only yield its full value, I suspect, if read alongside Lyons's book; it would appear, in truth, to be designed - or at any rate to function best - as a complement to the book, rather than a fully satisfying independent entity.

Glyn Pursglove