We investigated the ability to perform solfeggio, i.e. oral reading of musi
cal notes in MP. a 65 year-old female professional musician, who, following
a left temporoparietal ischemia, showed a complex pattern of amusia. The d
eficit on which we focused was her inability to read orally the bass (F) cl
ef, often substituting it with the violin (G) clef. This problem could not
be attributed to a lack of comprehension. The patient could in fact correct
ly perform on the piano the same sequences she erroneously read aloud; she
was also able to correctly judge whether two strings, one in bass clef and
the other in violin clef, represented the same sequence of notes. The probl
em seems to lie in the inability to retrieve note names keeping into accoun
t the clef-rule. It is hypothesized that, in the production of note names,
this function requires the identification and application of syntactic-like
information, in analogy with what is thought to happen in the retrieval of
other words.