The Curwen Hand Signs

The Curwen Hand Signs, Major scale, descending 

Image	Sol-fa	description
	do	fist , at forehead
	ti	hand at eye level pointer up
	la	relaxed hand hanging down from wrist, chin level
	sol	palm towards chest
	fa	thumb down
	mi	flat hand horizontal
	re	flat hand, palm down, slanting upward
	do	low "do" is a fist at belt height

Reverend John Curwen (1816–1880) was an English Congregationalist minister, and founder of the Tonic sol-fa system of music education with the help of Sarah Ann Glover.


Curwen's system was designed to aid in sight reading of the stave with its lines and spaces. He adapted it from a number of earlier musical systems, including the Norwich Sol-fa method of Sarah Ann Glover (1785–1867) of Norwich. Her Sol-fa system was based on the ancient gamut; but she omitted the constant recital of the alphabetical names of each note and the arbitrary syllable indicating key relationship, and also the recital of two or more such syllables when the same note was common to as many keys (e.g. C, Fa, Ut, meaning that C is the subdominant of G and the tonic of C). The notes were represented by the initials of the seven syllables, still in use in Italy and France as their names. Curwen taught himself to sight-read based on Glover's Norwich Sol-fa, made alterations and improvements, and named his method Tonic Sol-fa. In the Tonic Sol-fa the seven letters refer to key relationship (relative pitch) and not to absolute pitch. Curwen utilised the first letter (lowercase) of each of the solmisation tones (do, re, me, fa, sol, la, ti), and a rhythmic system that used bar lines (prefixing strong beats), half bar lines (prefixing medium beats), and semicolons (prefixing weak beats) in each measure.


Depiction of Curwen's Solfege hand signs. This version includes the tonal tendencies and interesting titles for each tone.
Curwen felt the need for a simple way of teaching how to sing by note through his experiences among Sunday school teachers. Stemming from his religious and social beliefs, Curwen thought that music should be easily accessible to all classes and ages of people. Apart from Glover, similar ideas had been elaborated in France by Pierre Galin (1786–1821), Aimé Paris (1798–1866) and Emile Chevé (1804–1864), whose method of teaching how to read at sight also depended on the principle of tonic relationship being taught by the reference of every sound to its tonic, and by the use of a numeric notation. Curwen adapted French time names from Paris' Langue de durées.

Curwen technically did not invent Tonic Sol-fa. Rather he developed a distinct method of applying it in music education, including both rhythm and pitch. The name and current form can be traced to Curwen.

Tonic sol-fa (or Tonic sol-fah) is a pedagogical technique for teaching sight-singing, invented by Sarah Ann Glover (1785–1867) of Norwich, England and popularised by John Curwen who adapted it from a number of earlier musical systems. It uses a system of musical notation based on movable do solfège, whereby every tone is given a name according to its relationship with other tones in the key: the usual staff notation is replaced with anglicized solfège syllables (e.g. do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti, do) or their abbreviations (d,r,m,f,s,l,t,d). "Do" is chosen to be the tonic of whatever key is being used (thus the terminology moveable Do). The original solfège sequence started with "Ut" which later became "Do".

The use of a seven-note diatonic musical scale is ancient, though originally it was played in descending order.

In the eleventh century, the music theorist Guido of Arezzo developed a six-note ascending scale that went as follows: ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la, and named the Aretinian syllables after himself. A seventh note, "si" was added shortly after. The names were taken from the first verse of the Latin hymn Ut queant laxis, where the syllables fall on their corresponding scale degree.

Ut queant laxīs    resonāre fībrīs
Mīra gestōrum    famulī tuōrum,
Solve pollūtī    labiī reātum,
Sancte Iōhannēs.

The words of the hymn (The Hymn of St. John) were written by Paulus Diaconus in the 8th century. It translates[8] as:

So that these your servants can, with all their voice, sing your wonderful feats, clean the blemish of our spotted lips, O Saint John!

"Ut" was changed in the 1600s in Italy to the open syllable Do,[9] at the suggestion of the musicologue Giovanni Battista Doni, and Si (from the initials for "Sancte Iohannes") was added to complete the diatonic scale. In Anglophone countries, "si" was changed to "ti" by Sarah Glover in the nineteenth century so that every syllable might begin with a different letter.[10] "Ti" is used in tonic sol-fa and in the song "Do-Re-Mi".

"Do-Re-Mi" is a show tune from the 1959 Rodgers and Hammerstein musical The Sound of Music. Each syllable of the musical solfège system appears in the song's lyrics, sung on the pitch it names.

The lyrics teach the solfège syllables by linking them with English homophones (or near-homophones):

Doe: a deer, a female deer, alludes to the first solfège syllable, do.
Ray: a drop of golden sun [i.e. a narrow beam of light or other radiant energy], alludes to the second solfège syllable, re.
Me: a name I call myself [i.e. the objective first-person pronoun], alludes to the third solfège syllable, mi.
Fa' [i.e. "far"]: a long long way to run," alludes to the fourth solfège syllable, fa.
Sew: [the verb for] a needle pulling thread," alludes to the fifth solfège syllable, sol.
La, the sixth solfège syllable, lacking a satisfactory homophone (see below), is directly referred to in the song as a note to follow so[l].
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 solfège syllable, ti.
As the song concludes, "When you know the notes to sing, you can sing most anything'".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Curwen
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Do-Re-Mi
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonic_sol-fa