The Solfeggio Tradition: A Forgotten Art of Melody in the Long Eighteenth Century Nicholas Baragwanath New York: Oxford University Press, 2020 pp. xix + 410, ISBN 978 0 197 51408 5

Having your eyes opened to an entire world of music history, especially one that you thought you understood but clearly did not, can be an exhilarating experience. That eighteenth-century musicians could have had such different training in melody is both surprising and genuinely intriguing. Imagine, for example, posing this question to a group of talented graduate students: ‘Which tradition of melodic training was closest to what Haydn learned as a choirboy at the Stephansdom in Vienna – “fixed do” (à la Paris Conservatoire) or “moveable do” (as in many American colleges)?’ Until the appearance of Nicholas Baragwanath’s new book, the students would have had no comprehensive source to consult. They might guess one or the other answer, but it is likely that no one would give the correct answer, which is ‘None of the above’. As the author makes clear, even though our present consumption of music from eighteenthcentury Europe focuses on the marvels composed for wealthy courts and theatres, the musical centre of gravity for eighteenth-century contemporaries resided in the church. Viewed as a musicproducing institution, a dukedom’s single court or theatre could perform only a small fraction of the music provided in daily services at its hundreds of churches. Much of that music was plainchant, and so training boys to serve as choristers was the central focus of music education in much of Europe. The pedagogy attributed to Guido of Arezzo was not merely a relic of late medieval times but a living presence in the lives of young choristers and seminarians during the Enlightenment. If Stefano Mengozzi’s 2010 book The Renaissance Reform of Medieval Music Theory: Guido of Arezzo between Myth and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) traces that tradition from the eleventh to the sixteenth century, Baragwanath’s book takes it from the seventeenth to the early nineteenth. Three of the greatest nineteenth-century quests were to find the sources of the Nile, of the Mississippi and of Gregorian chant. The living tradition of chant had been, if not severed, then at least heavily damaged during the Napoleonic era. Seeking pure medieval sources to make repairs, scholars turned their backs on the practice of chant in the eighteenth century or indeed almost any chant practice of the post-Tridentine era. Fortunately for us today, a large corpus of small manuals for choristers in early modern Europe has managed to survive. Drawing on these manuals, which exhibit great uniformity from rural Poland all the way to the southern tip of Italy, Baragwanath details how chant was still taught to boys like Haydn using the old four-line staff and F or C clefs. The boys learned the hexachordal note names (do, re, mi, fa, sol, la) and first practised just saying (not singing) them as they read the old chant notation. The F line of the F clef was fa, with mi below it, and the same was true for the C line of the C clef (thus fa with mi below it). Rather than being conceived as a tonic, keynote or final, ‘do’ meant a note at the bottom of a hexachord, any note of which might be the local keynote or tonic. Although the situation was