The Power of Suggestion

Greetings from snow-blanketed Denver!

The Universe gave me the unexpected gift of a snow day yesterday -- despite my disappointment in the cancellation/delay of conference events at my British Studies gig, I must confess how badly I'd needed a real day off.

A little time to think and gather myself, plus a few conversations with my graduate colleagues and some of my private students, have brought the article below back to my mind:

http://www.npr.org/blogs/krulwich/2011/12/07/143265882/vowels-control-your-brain?sc=fb&cc=fp

The gist of the article is this: front vowels ([i], [I], [e], [E]) tend to imply smallness or lightness, and back vowels ([u], [o], [a]) tend to imply heaviness or largeness.  Obviously, this isn't completely universal, but there are definitely some pretty convincing examples in the article.

What does this have to do with solfa, you ask?  Well...I have a bit of a pet theory that I can't exactly prove yet that Guido's choice of syllables (and the later evolution of our modern syllables, including chromatics) wasn't merely coincidental with the beginning of each line of the chant Ut queant laxis.  I believe the syllables were chosen intuitively and intentionally to phonetically represent both the tendencies and the relative placement of each tone.  Furthermore, I believe these vowel choices had some impact on the evolution from a modal to a tonal system.

Here's what I mean -- the original six syllables were ut, re, mi, fa, so, & la.  If we go strictly by the rubric above, ut, fa, so, and la fall into the category of back vowels, and re & mi belong to the front vowel category.  I would argue that Guido's Italianate [a] would have been more toward the bright (front) side, especially in the case of la, since the dental [l] pulls the tongue forward (resulting in a more fronted vowel).  Let's leave fa in the back vowel camp for now, and assume that we now have this situation:

ut (heavy)
re (light)
mi (light)
fa  (heavy)
so (heavy)
la  (light)

or in the more modern system:

do (heavy) 

re (light) 

mi (light)

fa  (heavy)

so (heavy)

la  (light)

ti  (light)

Now, as speakers of American-accented English, we pronounce these syllables differently, so they feel a little different to us, and our pronunciation idiosyncrasies create intonation issues different from the ones likely encountered in 11th-century Italy.  If we think carefully about our pronunciation, however, the tendencies of these vowels reflect the proper intonation for a major scale, especially if we designate the vowel [o] as "stable" rather than "heavy" (which seems an allowable substitution to me):

do (stable) 

re (light)             (note that the resulting do-re-mi 3rd should be wide)

mi (light)

fa  (heavy)

so (stable)

la  (light)

ti  (light)

If this theory holds water, it casts some significant doubts on the pedagogical wisdom of both fixed-do solfege (where the vowels are at least partly contradictory of correct intonation in all keys except C) and do-based minor (where the syllables me, le, & te are used to denote the lowered 3rd, 6th, and 7th scale degrees in minor, and each has a vowel that still implies "highness" -- la to le being particularly egregious).  In my earlier years, I felt much more absolute about all this.  These days, I'm more willing to acknowledge that vowel influence is probably much stronger for some people than it is for others.  However, from an acoustical standpoint, this all seems to hold up, too, and if physical fact gives one system even a small advantage over another, I think that's worth acknowledging.  If vowels can suggest to ear and voice that two notes have a certain relationship to one another, why not use the power of suggestion to our students' advantage?

I'm curious to know what you all think about this, and I'd like you to try it out and let me know:

All Levels

Read the NPR article and all my verbiage above.

Track down your Ottman book and read some examples that come easily for you (ch. 2-9, as appropriate).  The first time through, sing without thinking much about the syllables -- just sing as you normally would.  The second time through, be extremely sensitive to your pronunciation of each syllable.  Does your intonation improve?  Do you feel an increased sensitivity to the proper intonation of each syllable/interval?  If you like, choose a few examples in minor and try singing them once in do-based minor and once in la-based minor, both times with a strong focus on pronunciation.  Was it hard to get the intonation of the lowered scale degrees correct in do-based minor?  Try singing an example or two in fixed-do (no chromatic inflections, meaning that F-flat, F, and F-sharp are all called fa), still with an eye towards pronunciation.  What happens to your intonation?  

I'm really quite curious to hear what you discover...