Permission granted for the use of this 2 volume dissertation by Dr. Sean Doherty, Dublin City University, Dublin, Ire.

SUMMARY

Solfaing: History of Four-Syllable Solmization to the Present Day

“This thesis traces the history of solfaing, a four-syllable method of solmization, from its first presentation by William Bathe (1564-1614) in his A Briefe Introduction to the Skill of Song to its persistence in present-day America. Scholarship has not yet accurately linked the American publications to their heritage, nor the English tradition to its progeny. It is possible, by study of the theoretical sources, as well as of hymn and psalm books, to trace a direct line of transmission from Bathe’s publication to the revisions of shape-note tunebooks still in use as part of the ‘Sacred Harp’ tradition.William Bathe wrote the first music textbook published in England, in which he reformed the complex, unwieldy, and imprecise rules regarding hexachordal mutations that had vexed singers for centuries. Bathe reduced the six-syllable hexachord to a repeated sequence of four syllables that spanned an octave; this method of solmization became standard in seventeenth-century England. Aside from theoretical considerations, a parallel history of the metrical psalms is important to this narrative. A symbiotic relationship developed between solfaing and the metrical psalms that propelled solfaing across the Atlantic, where it may be seen in the ninth edition of the first book printed on American soil, the Bay Psalm Book. The innovation of the American publications was to print music with prescribed solmization syllables within the notation. Generations of European singers had grappled with the Guidonian gamut and the manifold rules of its navigation. In the United States, solmization syllables were designated visually through shaped noteheads. In the nineteenth century, these immensely popular shape-note publications were disseminated by the long-lived institution of the American singing school that transmitted solfaing throughout the continent, where it still persists as part of the Sacred Harp tradition.”"

Dr. Sean Doherty, Dublin City University, Dublin, Ire.

Solfaing: The History of Four Syllable Solmization to the Present Day. Vol. 1.