Hooked on Sol-Fa: the do-re-mi heuristic for Yorùbá speech tones

Abstract

AbstractSarah Ann Glover (1785–1867) believed that singing was for the public good and Samuel Àjàyí Crowther (1809–91) thought that speech tones should be preserved in writing. Their stories illustrate that diversity in thought may encounter obstacles, but can ultimately shape human consciousness. While this shows a positive side of missionary work, bringing people and ideas together, the transmission of Glover's and Crowther's ideas was mediated by the overlapping political, social and cultural hegemonies of the colonial era. Crowther was celebrated in the English-speaking world as evidence that the civilizing agenda – and colonialism – was good for all involved, but his orthographic approach was credited to the missionary linguist Johann Gottlieb Christaller. Glover's innovations in music education have been misattributed to John Curwen and Zoltán Kodály. Drawing evidence from ethnographic work, field recordings, language surveys and literature from a variety of disciplines, this article asks the question: why is do-re-mi the preferred heuristic for Yorùbá speech tone? Glover's and Crowther's physical paths never crossed, but their ideas did, converging in a remarkable inter-continental and trans-disciplinary synthesis. The do-re-mi heuristic resists the pitch-height paradigm used in formal linguistics (low-mid-high). In a culture where drums can speak, it is unsurprising that a musical model filled a void in the (European) concept of what a language could be.