26 September 2025, 13:47 | Updated: 26 September 2025, 15:36
What is solfège and what does Julie Andrews he to do with it?
Picture:
Alamy
By Katie Vickers
And what’s Julie Andrews and a female deer got to do with it?
Listen to this article Loading audio...If you asked a cross-section of the UK population whether they knew solfège, the vast majority of them would say no. But start singing the words ‘Doe, a deer, a female deer’, and it’s a safe bet that many of them would be able to join in with the whole song.
It turns out all those people do know how to use solfège to sing the notes of the major scale.
In the beloved 1965 film The Sound of Music, based on the 1959 Rodgers & Hammerstein musical, Julie Andrews’ character Maria uses the song to teach solfège to the Von Trapp children. Handily, there are seven siblings, and seven notes in the scale. So she begins by allocating a note, and its corresponding syllable, to each of them, and before long she has them singing in perfect harmony.
Read more: When real-life Maria Von Trapp taught Julie Andrews how to yodel
"Do-Re-Mi" - THE SOUND OF MUSIC (1965)
Give me (a name I call myself) a potted history of solfègeThe roots of solfège reach back to the early 11th century, when the Italian monk and music theorist Guido d’Arezzo came up with a way of naming notes.
In the Latin hymn Ut queant laxis, each line begins on a successive note of the scale. Guido took the first syllable of each line as a name for that note, which ge Ut, Re, Mi, Fa, So, and La.
Centuries later, Ut was changed to Do, as syllables ending in a vowel are easier to sing, and Ti was added as the name of the seventh note of the scale.
In countries that use Romance and Slic languages, these syllables simply became the names of specific pitches – the note we call C in the UK is called Do, D is called Re, and so on. What we know as Bach’s Prelude in C major is called Prélude en Do majeur in French – it’s a simple matter of translation. This is also known as ‘fixed Do solfège’.
What Maria teaches her young charges, though, is ‘moveable Do solfège’. In this system, the tonic, or key note, is always called Do, the second step of the scale is Re, the third step is Mi, and so on, no matter what key a piece is in.
Read more: How did music notation begin?
The system was developed by Sarah Anna Glover in Norwich in the early 1800s, to teach singing to her Sunday school pupils. John Curwen expanded her ideas further (a less charitable Christian than Miss Glover might even say that he stole them and published them as his own).
He added a hand sign to represent each step of the scale, a useful visual aid especially when teaching very young children, before they learn to read. He even set up the Tonic Sol-Fa College in Forest Gate, and started his own press, to spread the joy of solfège to the learners of East London and beyond.
Diagram of John Curwen’s hand signs.
Picture:
Public domain
In the early 20th century, Hungarian composer and music educator Zoltán Kodály discovered moveable Do solfège on one of his regular visits to England, and it became a key element of his recommendations for music education. These evolved into the Kodály Method, a comprehensive teaching system incorporating movement, games and songs that is used around the world.
Read more: What is the circle of fifths?
So (a needle pulling thread)... what’s so great about solfège?The great advantage of moveable Do solfège is that it helps you understand what each note’s job is – its position within the scale, its relationship to the notes around it, and its role in the harmony. You’ll soon learn to recognise the patterns of notes that make up the most frequently-used intervals, chords and chord progressions.
And there’s no need to remember a key signature. Regardless of whether you’re learning a piece in G major (with one sharp) or D flat major (with five flats), Do is always the tonic or key note, La is always the sixth note of the scale, and you’ll know how a jump in the melody from Do up to La (a major sixth) should sound.
Learning solfège can help develop many musical skills, including singing in tune, playing by ear, sight-reading, improvising harmonies, and memorising music. And it makes it very easy to transpose a piece into a different key. If the original is too high for your voice, just move ‘Do’ to a lower pitch, and vice versa.
Composer and choral specialist Olivia Sparkhall is an advocate of solfège for teaching primary and KS3 children in a fun and structured way: “I wish it was taught in every school in the country. It really helps develop musicianship, and makes every child feel that they are a musician. It teaches you about the building blocks and structure of Western music ... and gives you a really solid foundation for going on to study music at GCSE, A level and beyond, or learning to sing or play an instrument to an advanced level.”
Sparkhall explains that many children (and learners of all ages) learn better when they’re moving. When she teaches, she gets kids standing up and moving around as well as learning the hand signs. “I don’t think there’s any young child who would rather sit still at a desk – you’re always going to he a better time if you can move around. And that means you’re breathing better too.”
If you’d like to he a go at learning solfège yourself, you could start with one of the many videos on YouTube. Who knows how far (a long, long way to run) it will take you?
As Julie Andrews tunefully taught us, “When you know the notes to sing, you can sing most anything.”