Music teachers throughout the world are familiar with the musical notation method of sight-singing tuition called Tonic Sol-Fa, brought to the attention of the public in The Sound of Music with Julie Andrews as Maria teaching the Von Trapp children the rudiments of music with the song Do-Re-Me.

Basingstoke played its part in the development of this simplified musical notation system when the Reverend John Curwen (1816-1880), minister of the Congregational Church in London Street, now the URC, modified an earlier version of notation to teach the children in his Sunday school. In doing so he became recognised as the creator of the Tonic Sol-Fa method.

The rudiments of the method started many years before when Sarah Ann Glover (1785-1867) from Norwich developed a system in 1812 for teaching sight-singing to children. From a simple version dated 1594 by John Windet, Sarah created a moveable scale of ‘do, re, me, fa, sol, la, ti, do’ reflecting the musical scale of seven notes plus one to bring the reader back to the higher keynote of ‘do’. The notation scale could be attributed to any tune and the lower ‘do’ placed anywhere to signify the higher keynote.

John Curwen developed this further after being commissioned by a conference of Sunday school teachers in 1841 to create an uncomplicated way of teaching pupils to read music, with the hope that this would eventually lead them to progress to the musical score, or staff notation, which is prevalent today amongst musicians and singers.

The success of this led to Curwen publishing his Grammar of Vocal Music in 1843, and The Boys’ Voice available from Blackwell’s, forming the Tonic Sol-Fa Association and later publishing the Standard Course of Lessons on the Tonic Sol-fa Method of Teaching to Sing. In 1879 he opened the Tonic Sol-Fa College and brought out the periodical the Tonic Sol-Fa Reporter and Magazine of Vocal Music for the People. In addition, he also introduced a method of hand signals relating to the Tonic Sol-Fa notes, to assist in the memorising of the scale.

The Tonic Sol-Fa method of teaching music was eventually introduced to South Africa, initially by Christian missionaries, in the mid nineteenth century where it became widespread in its use, but not all were impressed by this as critics suggested that the method had a negative impact on African culture by restricting tonal harmony – particularly when relating to jazz music.

However this method, now recognised throughout the world, is a far cry from the small beginnings in a Basingstoke Sunday school class room.