Ut queant laxis
"Ut queant laxis" or "Hymnus in Ioannem" is a
It is not known who wrote the melody. Guido of Arezzo possibly composed it,[2] but he more likely used an existing melody. A variant of the melody appears in an eleventh-century musical setting of Horace's poem Ode to Phyllis (4.11) recorded in a manuscript in France.[3]
Structure
The hymn uses classical metres: the Sapphic stanza consisting of three Sapphic hendecasyllables followed by an adonius (a type of dimeter).
The chant is useful for teaching singing because of the way it uses successive notes of the
The first stanza is:
Ut queant laxīs
resonāre fibrīs
Mīra gestōrum
famulī tuōrum,
Solve pollūtī
labiī reātum,
Sāncte Iohannēs.
It may be translated: So that your servants may, with loosened voices, resound the wonders of your deeds, clean the guilt from our stained lips, O Saint John.
A paraphrase by Cecile Gertken,
Do let our voices
resonate most purely,
miracles telling,
far greater than many;
so let our tongues be
lavish in your praises,
Saint John the Baptist.[4]
Ut is now mostly replaced by Do in
Liturgical use
In the Roman Rite, the hymn is sung in the Divine Office on June 24, the Feast of the Nativity of John the Baptist. The full hymn is divided into three parts, with "Ut queant laxis" sung at Vespers, "Antra deserti" sung at Matins, "O nimis felix" sung at Lauds, and doxologies added after the first two parts.
See also
- Diatonic and chromatic
- Do-Re-Mi (song). The lyrics teach the solfege syllables by linking them with English homophones (or near-homophones)
- Gamut
- Guidonian hand
- Solmization
References
- ISBN 978-0-85668-844-7
- ^ a b (in French) Ut queant laxis in Encyclopédie Larousse
- ^ This manuscript H425 is held in Bibliothèque de l'école de Médecine, Montpellier.
- ^ Gertken, Cecile: Feasts and Saints, 1981
- ^
McNaught, W. G. (1893). "The History and Uses of the Sol-fa Syllables". ISSN 0958-8442. Retrieved 2010-12-12.