>From: "Yoonchi" <r.g.jonis@...> >By the way, I thought every educated musician knows the meaning of the >symbols A..G. The DO thing is for kids, isn't it? Nope, it isn't exactly. In many (especially mediterranean) countries the do-de-mi thing still is widely spreaded. At a Music University however (according to the author of the original thread) they should really rely on the international standards of notation. I mean, in germany we also almost don't use the H anymore, at least not for modern music, the international B is used instead. Apart from that. the tone syllable system (the do-re-mi thing) originally was quite some useful thing as it was a relative system, meaning that "Do" allways described the first step of a major scale, so, in the key of C a "Mi" would be an E, in the key of Eb however it would be a G. Not that unhandy, there even was a system where you could "describe" those notes/steps by hand movements, AFAIK this was used often for choires and stuff. In todays praxis however you use arabic numbers to describe scale steps (like 1, 2, b3, 4, 5, 6, 7 for a dorian scale for instance) and roman numbers to descibe chord steps and their relationships (for example IImin7-V7-Imaj7 for a Dm7-G7-Cmaj7 progression in the key of C). Looks a bit more practical to me then the ancient do-re-mi system. Also this system is not used as a relative system anymore but as an absolute system. So, these days a "Do" allways means C, no matter which key you are in. It's beyond my knowledge what they use for flats and sharps though. Sascha