The Nativity of St. John Baptist: a Movie and a Hymn

In 2006, there appeared a worthwhile cinematic telling of "The Nativity Story." I loved it: I watched it at the cinema about a half-dozen times that December, and donated a copy of the DVD to the public library.

One of my favorite scenes is the portrayal of the Visitation of the Blessed Virgin Mary to her cousin Elizabeth:
Part 3 of 10
The clip begins with the Annunciation. The part about the Visitation begins at 6:30 in the clip. If I remember rightly, the actress who plays Elizabeth, Shohreh Aghdashloo, is herself a Palestinian Christian. She well portrays this great and holy woman.

The story continues in the next clip, part 4 of 10, which recounts the Birth of St. John Baptist and his Circumcision.

Here is the whole movie.


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The office hymn for this Feast is number 271 in the Hymnal 1982, Ut queant laxis (The great forerunner of the morn).

It from this hymn that the master teacher and Benedictine monk Guido of Arezzo (born 991 or 992, died after 1033) derived what we now know as solfege, and as a corollary invented the modern system of musical notation. Both innovations were aimed at making it easier for choristers to learn the plainsong chants of the Church.

Guido noticed that the six scale steps are clearly outlined as the first note of the first six phrases of this tune, and he assigned the text syllables from these points to the scale degrees: Ut - Re - Mi - Fa - Sol - La. Here is a little YouTube clip that perfectly illustrates what is happening: it shows the plainchant with the appropriate syllables outlined in boxes.

To appreciate Guido's leap of imagination, one must recall that the song was not written down for him to look at, not in a form like this. What he had was a text with squiggly lines above it, which very roughly indicated the shape of the tune, and the tune which he had learned by ear. All of the tunes, the enormous mass of Chant for the liturgical year, had to be transmitted by ear from generation to generation.

Guido realized that if one extracted these six pitches and named them, the pitches would have the same name in any chant, any musical composition, and they could then be written down in a clearly indicative manner, including the relationships of half steps and whole steps (the half step is always between Mi and Fa). Further, the entire corpus of chant could be notated with these syllables (and the use of Hexachords, which are multiple overlapping sets of these six pitches).

This changed the world.
(Well, at least the world of music.)

"Ut" was changed to "Doh" some five centuries later because the vowel was thought to sound better in the voice, and "Si" was added about that same time for reasons that are too complex to here recount; in part, it allows one to dispense with the system of overlapping hexachords. In English-speaking countries, "Si" was changed to "Ti" in the nineteenth century so that each syllable would begin with a different letter.