>> Mom left nothing but trash, mostly, but this one book crawled out from under
>> a pile of magazines and papers and caught my eye. It is not dated. Called
>> "Scotland Calling in 50 Scottish Songs", it has both staff notation and
>> sol-fa. For someone who has only a vague knowledge of sol-fa, this is rather
>> like finding the rosetta stone.
I've seen this but don't have a copy here. I'll look it up in the NLS
card catalogue when I'm there next.
> Sol-fa notation was almost universal in the interwar period. It was used
> for the Community Song Books which appeared when radio first became
> available, and was often combined with ukelele chord symbols. It was
> also used earlier on in school curriculum songbooks.
> 'Scotland Calling' must surely date this to radio era, and the early
> radio era at that. I would guess 1928-32.
Curwen solfa was invented in the middle of the 19th century and caught on
almost immediately, particularly in churches, and even more particularly
in the Scottish ones, as there was no requirement for a supply of the
tadpoles of Satan to feed that Papist abomination, the church organ. So
most nineteenth century psalters are in solfa. Presumably because most
Gaels were familiar with the notation from the Kirk, it was used to notate
the Mod's standardized Gaelic song arrangements of the years around 1900
(Coisir a Mhod), and is still the prevalent notation for that genre. But
outside the Kirk and the Gaelic world, it was well on the way out by 1930.
The most recent book I've got that uses it is the Scottish Psalter of 1929,
though I dare say there are many more I haven't seen.
Most solfa psalters had a clever design with the pages split horizontally,
tune above and words below, so you could mix-and-match if the metre fitted.
There are enough folk songs with alternative tunes that this idea ought to
find wider application.
The basic reference is Curwen's "Standard Course", first published in 1858.
I have the 7th edition of 1901; it has some wondrous diagrams, like the
"Extended Modulator" and the page of hand signals to designate pitches (in
principle this could permit singing by sign language to the deaf). These
eccentricities aside, it's a damn good text that well deserved its success.
There are some advantages to solfa over ABC; when I write ABC I invariably
use the solfa-inspired idea of aligning the beats in parallel phrases to
make them more easily readable - there's 150 years of experience to say
this works when writing music in a textual notation.
Folklore has it that Curwen got the idea from canntaireachd, or some folk
simplification thereof.
I have occasionally thought about implementing an ABC-to-solfa translator.
The bit I don't have a tool to do is a solfa font; anybody got a copy of
Fontographer?
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