You know “do re mi fa sol la ti”? This system for naming notes was invented by a guy named Guido of Arezzo around 1000 AD. But he only named the first 6 notes, because the whole idea of a 7-note scale wasn’t very important for him: instead he used hexachords. And instead of “do” he used “ut”—because these were words in a Latin song.
In the 1600s, a musicologist named Giovanni Battist Doni added the name “si” for the seventh note. And around 1850, Sarah Ann Glover, an English music teacher, changed “si” to “ti” so that each note would start with a different consonant. But in many languages it’s still called “si”.
Doni also changed “ut” to “do”. He said that “do” sounds more musical than “ut,” and that “do” is an abbreviation of “Dominus”, Latin for The Lord: “the tonic and root of the world”.
However, a lot of people suspect that Doni named “do” after himself!
(Euler was similarly sneaky in naming the number e. He wrote a paper where the first constant was called a, the second b, and so on, with the famous number 2.71828… being the fifth one. But e just so happens to also be the first letter of his name!)
Doni corresponded with the famous mathematician Mersenne, who worked on the math of music. Mersenne liked the idea of equal temperament—the system we now use, where the notes are equally spaced. But equal temperament caught only much later.
Doni fought against equal temperament. In 1640 he wrote a funny letter to Mersenne, about a mysterious “old man in rags” who persuaded the famous musician Frescobaldi to embrace equal temperament, by the clever trick of giving him lots of free drinks!
You may remember, not long ago, a certain old man in rags came into our city; he knew nothing except how to play the harpsichord, and he thrust forth as a new and very useful invention that equality of semitones which is commonly but erroneously attribed to Aristoxenus. And the noble organist, Frescobaldi, who was then in charge of music at the palace, he reduced to such a state, by giving him frequent and free drinks, that he was not ashamed, against the proof of his own ears, to extol that invention to the heavens to the good Prince. The old man carried the thing so far that this same Prince, who at the time was refashioning one of the foremost and oldest basilicas of the city, especially the very fine apse and auditorium, ordered that the noble organ of this church be reduced to that dissonant kind of tuning; and had not our Doni with the most certain reasons explained to him the vainness of the work, the waste of money, and the bad name of impropriety which was being reflected upon Roman musicians, he would have had it done.
Pretty entertaining! But perhaps that’s not so surprising, since Doni held the Chair of Eloquence at the University of Florence.
I’ve been trying to learn Mersenne’s thoughts on tuning systems, and I discovered Doni’s amusing letter here:
• Mark Lindley, Mersenne on keyboard tuning, Journal of Music Theory 24 (1980), 166–203.
This article is on JSTOR, and you can read it there if you get a free account with them.