Adventurer

Joined: 28 Jan 2006
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Posted: Mon Feb 05, 2007 7:22 am Post subject: Do-re-mi was first hummed by the Romans |
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Do-re-mi was first hummed by the Romans
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 2,000 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, written in the 1st century BC.
The research has been carried out by Stuart Lyons, who won a classics scholarship to King's College, Cambridge. A businessman who chairs the Airsprung Furniture Company, he did the work in his spare time.
"The monk who invented Do-Re-Mi took the music from a song written 1,000 years earlier by a pagan poet and songwriter and told a lie about it because he didn't want to go to the stake [for heresy]," Lyons said.
Do-re-mi was first hummed by the Romans
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 2,000 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, written in the 1st century BC.
The research has been carried out by Stuart Lyons, who won a classics scholarship to King's College, Cambridge. A businessman who chairs the Airsprung Furniture Company, he did the work in his spare time.
"The monk who invented Do-Re-Mi took the music from a song written 1,000 years earlier by a pagan poet and songwriter and told a lie about it because he didn't want to go to the stake [for heresy]," Lyons said.
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