Home | Songs By Year | Songs from 1959
Do-Re-Mi
Buy Do-Re-Mi now from AmazonFirst, read the Wikipedia article. Then, scroll down to see what other TopShelfReviews readers thought about the song. And once you've experienced the song, tell everyone what you thought about it.
Wikipedia article
"'Do-Re-Mi'" is a show tune from the 1959 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical 'The Sound of Music'. Each syllable of the musical solfge system appears in the song's lyrics, sung on the pitch it names. Rodgers was helped in its creation by long-time arranger Trude Rittmann who devised the extended vocal sequence in the song.
The tune finished at #88 in AFI's 100 Years...100 Songs survey of the top tunes in American cinema in 2004.
Background
Within the story of 'The Sound of Music', it is used by the governess Maria to teach the solfge of the major musical scale to the Von Trapp children, who learn to sing for the first time. According to assistant conductor Peter Howard, the heart of the number – in which governess Maria assigns a musical tone to each child, like so many Swiss bell ringers – was devised in rehearsal by Rittmann (who was credited for choral arrangements) and choreographer Joe Layton. The fourteen note and tune lyric – 'when you know the notes to sing...' – were provided by Rodgers and Hammerstein; the rest, apparently, came from Rittmann. According to Howard, "Rodgers allowed her to do whatever she liked. When we started doing the staging of it, Joe took over. He asked Trude for certain parts to be repeated, certain embellishments."
In the stage version, Maria sings the song in the living room of Captain von Trapp's house shortly after she introduces herself to the children. However, when Ernest Lehman adapted the stage script into a screenplay for the 1965 film adaptation, he moved the song to later on in the story. In the film, Maria and the children sing this song over a montage as they wander and frolic over Salzburg.
Word meanings
'(For the actual origins of the solfge, refer to Solfge.)'
The lyrics teach the solfge syllables by linking them with English homophones (or near-homophones):
#'Doe': a deer, a female deer,' alludes to the first solfge syllable, 'do'.
#'Ray': a drop of golden sun' [i.e., a narrow beam of light or other radiant energy], alludes to the second solfge syllable, 're'.
#'Me': a name I call myself' [i.e., the objective first-person pronoun], alludes to the third solfge syllable, 'mi'.
#'Far': 'a long long way to run', alludes to the fourth solfge syllable, 'fa'.
#'Sew': [the verb form] 'a needle pulling thread,' alludes to the fifth solfge syllable, 'sol'.
#'La': 'a note to follow 'so[l]' and represents the sixth solfge syllable, 'la'.
#'Tea': a drink with jam and bread' [i.e., the popular hot beverage made by steeping tea leaves in boiling water], alludes to the seventh solfge syllable, 'ti'.
As the song concludes, "When you know the notes to sing, you can sing most anything."
Author Douglas Adams noted in his article "Unfinished Business of the Century" that, while each line of the lyric takes the name of a note from the solfge scale, and gives its meaning, "La, a note to follow So..." does not fit that pattern and should be considered a placeholder. Adams humorously imagined that Oscar Hammerstein just wrote "a note to follow So" and thought he would have another look at it later, but could not come up with anything better.Adams, Douglas: Unfinished Business of the Century - [https://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/h2g2/A171839 h2g2 - Unfinished Business of the Century] h2g2, Sep. 1999']
Foreign language versions
Since the song features wordplay with English words that sound like the solfge syllables, foreign versions of the song do not translate the English lyrics. Instead, they use the local solfge and associate each syllable with a meaning in the native language. In most countries, the note B is represented by 'si' instead of 'ti'.
Austrian version with letters
When 'The Sound of Music' was translated to German in 2005 for the Vienna Volksoper, the song 'Do-Re-Mi' was rewritten as 'C wie Cellophanpapier'. The solfge syllables were replaced with the letters C through H, and the mnemonics were words that began with each letter. However, when the musical finally premiered in its setting of Salzburg in 2011, it was performed with a German version of Do-Re-Mi that kept the solfge.See also
*Alphabet song
*Musical scale
*Solfge
*Solresol
Notes
References
Buy Do-Re-Mi now from Amazon
<-- Return to songs from 1959