Repeat Signs in Tonic Solfa Hymn Books: A 5-Step Road Map

The organist plays the last chord of the refrain, and half the altos turn back to the first line while the tenors are still looking for the second-time bar. Three bars later you have two versions of the hymn going at once, and nobody is sure who is right.

Repeat signs in tonic solfa hymn books are the signposts that tell you which bars to sing again and where to jump: a dotted double bar sends you back, D.C. means return to the beginning, D.S. means return to the sign, Fine marks the end, and first and second time bars swap the ending on the repeat.

In this post I will show you what each mark looks like in solfa, then give you a road map you can draw on your copy before rehearsal, using a hymn with a refrain as the worked example. The aim is simple: every section repeats the same way, first time.

Repeat signs in tonic solfa hymn books: the main marks

Most solfa hymn books borrow their repeat marks from staff notation, so if you have ever seen them in a piano book you already know them. The difference is where they sit on the page and what they can be confused with. Each book has its own habits, so check the preface or the first few hymns of yours, but these are the marks you are most likely to meet:

One trap is particular to solfa. In printed hymn book solfa, the colon is used inside the bar to separate beats, as I explain in how to read solfa in a hymn book. Repeat dots look similar at a glance. The rule I give my singers: a colon between notes is a beat; dots pressed against a double bar line are a repeat. Look at the bar line first, then at the dots.

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What do D.C. and D.S. mean in tonic solfa?

D.C. and D.S. in tonic solfa mean exactly what they mean in staff notation: D.C. sends you back to the beginning and D.S. sends you back to a sign. The Italian is da capo, 'from the head', and dal segno, 'from the sign'.

They usually travel with a second instruction that tells you where to stop:

• D.C. al Fine: go back to the start and sing until you reach Fine.
• D.S. al Fine: go back to the segno and sing until Fine.
• D.C. al Coda or D.S. al Coda: go back, sing until you see the coda sign, then jump straight to the coda.

Two habits stop most mistakes here. First, on the first time through, ignore Fine and the coda sign completely; they only apply on the way back. Second, when a page has a segno, find it before you start singing and circle it. Under pressure, singers scan for the beginning of the hymn, not for a small sign halfway down the page.

If you also read the staff edition, the marks are identical there, so a singer using staff and a singer using solfa can follow the same road map. My guide on how to read staff notation if you know solfa is useful if your choir mixes both.

How do first and second time bars work in solfa?

First and second time bars in solfa give one section two different endings: you sing the bracket marked 1 the first time, go back, and on the repeat jump over it to the bracket marked 2.

In solfa the brackets sit over the bars just as they do over a staff, and they often cover more than one bar. Read the whole length of the bracket before you sing, because a common slip is to sing only the first bar under bracket 1 and then go back too early.

Why do composers use them? Very often because of the rhythm. The first ending has to lead back to the start, which may begin with a pickup note, so the last bar of ending 1 is shortened or filled to make room for it. Ending 2 leads somewhere new, so it is written to a full bar or a held note. That is also your clue when you are unsure: if one ending finishes on a held doh, that is almost certainly the way out.

A practical tip: on a long hymn, write a small arrow in pencil at the end of bracket 1 pointing back to where the repeat starts, and a small 2 above the place you land on the way out.

How to follow a refrain repeat in solfa: Blessed Assurance

To follow a refrain repeat in solfa, sing the verse, sing the printed refrain, then go back to the top of the verse for the next stanza, and keep doing that until the last verse. Gospel songs make this the commonest repeat of all, and many books do not print a sign for it at all; the refrain is simply printed once, with the verse words stacked between the lines.

Take Blessed Assurance, which I cover in detail in Blessed Assurance tonic solfa for choir. Here is how the verse begins:

Doh is D9/8

mBless-redda-

sssu---srance,--fJe-ssuslis

smine!-----sOmwhatsa

Notice the three notes before the first full bar. That is a pickup. Every time you go back for the next verse, you go back to those pickup notes, not to the first full bar. If the refrain ends on a long held note, the choir needs to cut it off in time to breathe and come in on the pickup together. That moment, the turn from the end of the refrain to the start of verse two, is where choirs most often split.

Compare a hymn that starts on the first beat of the bar:

Doh is Ab4/4

m’Tis-rso-dsweet--t,to

l,trust-din-l,Je--s,sus,-

'Tis So Sweet begins straight on the downbeat, so the turn back is cleaner: the refrain ends, there is a breath, and the verse starts on beat one. Put the two hymns side by side in rehearsal and your choir will hear why the pickup matters on the repeat. If the idea of a pickup is new to anyone, send them to what is a pickup note before Sunday.

Refrain hymns also hide one more question that the page cannot answer: what happens at the very end? Some choirs sing the refrain twice after the last verse, some slow the last line, some add a key change. None of that is in the book. It is a decision, and it has to be written down.

Build a road map before the choir sings: 5 steps

This is the routine I use with any hymn that has repeats. It takes five minutes at home and saves far more than that in rehearsal.

1. Number the bars. In pencil, put a small number above the first bar of each line on your copy. Count the pickup as bar 0 if there is one, so bar 1 is the first full bar. Ask section leaders to number theirs the same way.
2. Circle every sign. Repeat dots, D.C., D.S., the segno, Fine, the coda sign and both ends of each bracket. If you cannot find where a D.S. sends you, stop and look until you do.
3. Write the order as a line of bar numbers. For example, for an imagined hymn with a repeated first half: 0 to 8 with ending 1, back to 0, 0 to 7, ending 2, then 9 to 16. For a refrain hymn, write verse, refrain, verse, refrain, and so on, with the number of verses.
4. Add the decisions the book does not make. Which verses are sung, whether the refrain is doubled at the end, who sings which verse if you split it between sections, and any final slowing. Write them under the order.
5. Read it out before singing. At the start of rehearsal, say the road map aloud while everyone points along on their copy. Then sing only the joins: the last bar before each jump and the first bar after it. Once the joins are clean, sing it through.

Step five is the one that changes things. Most repeat trouble is not about notes; it is about two or three bars where the eye has to leave the page and come back somewhere else. Drilling only those bars, slowly, three or four times, fixes most of it.

Common repeat mix-ups and how to settle them

These are the arguments I hear most often in rehearsal, and the quick way to settle each one.

• 'Do we repeat the introduction?' A D.C. takes you to the very first note of the vocal line. Whether the organist replays an introduction is a separate decision; agree it with the accompanist and write it down.
• 'Is that a repeat or a beat?' Check whether the dots touch a double bar. If they do, it is a repeat.
• 'The recording does it differently.' Recordings often add refrains, skip verses or change key. Your road map is what the choir sings. If you like what the recording does, copy it onto the road map deliberately rather than letting half the choir copy it by memory.
• 'Which ending did we just sing?' If the choir is lost, the director should call the bar number aloud, not the words, because the same words often appear in both endings.
• 'We stopped at Fine the first time.' Fine only counts on the way back. A quick fix is to write 'on repeat' next to it in pencil.

If you are learning a new hymn from a recording rather than the book, the order is even easier to lose, because a recording has no signs at all. Listen once with the page in front of you and tick each section as it passes; that becomes your first draft of the road map.

Practise the joins at home

The best home practice for repeats is to loop the turn: the last bar of the refrain and the first bar of the next verse, over and over, until going back feels as natural as going on. Say the bar numbers under your breath as you go. For the full hymn texts and solfa, you can work from the Blessed Assurance and 'Tis So Sweet to Trust in Jesus pages.

If you are learning a song from a recording, NoteFusion can turn the recording or a YouTube, Spotify or Apple Music link into Tonic Solfa with staff notation, and play the tune back on a piano, slower or looped, so you can drill the join before rehearsal. You can then save the sheet and share it with a link, with your road map written in the message beside it. Try it at /app.