In one well-known scene in “The Sound of Music,” which takes place in the Mirabell Gardens, Maria and the children dance around the statue of Pegasus, the winged horse, singing “Do-Re-Mi.” During the song, one of the children complains that the nonsensical syllables “...don’t mean anything...” What she doesn’t realize, of course, is that the lyrics have their roots in medieval choral music, drawn from syllables of each of the first six phrases of the text of a hymn to St. John the Baptist.
Written by Paolo Diacono (ca 720 - 799) the Latin words “Ut queant laxis, Resonare fibris, Mira gestorum, Famuli tuorum, Solve polluti, Labii reatum,” translate to “So that Your servants may sing at the top of one’s voices the wonders of Your acts, absolve the fault from their stained lips.”
Using the syllables ut, re, mi, fa, sol, and la as names for the six tones, C to A, an Italian monk named
Guido d’Arezzo (990-1050) created the System of Solmization (sometimes called, after him, Aretinian
syllables or the Guido System of Syllables). Later ut was replaced by the more singable do and another syllable, si or ti, was added, giving the scale seven syllables called do-re-mi-fa-sol-la-ti to form the present system of singing names for the tones of the scale. The syllable sol was later shortened to so, making all syllables uniform in spelling and ending with a vowel.
(http://italian.about.com/library/weekly/aa092700a.htm)
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