There’s a way to use solfa to introduce key signatures, and I’ll be posting about that soon (I hope).

I just started a blog, http://moveabledo.com, as I wanted to put together a series of browser-accessible exercises to sharpen my sight singing skills.

It’s just a labor of love, so please check it out, comment, and pass the word if you find it useful.

Thanks,

– Eugene

However, the comment stands, and so perhaps others might care to contribute on this.

Thanks, Ugo.

In fact Bennett is describing one powerful use of “moveable-do.” In the movable system we can assign ANY pitch to DO and so can either label or think of ANY natural minor scale as:
“do re ma fa so la ta do” OR “la ti do re mi fa so la.”

As a longtime Kodály teacher trained by Hungarians, I was often reminded that Hungary is “LA” land. It is among those cultures in which the minor scale has primacy in the indigenous music. There it would be silly to think of the minor scale in terms of alterations of the major as in the “do re ma” example.
For we folks in “DO land,” however explaining the minor scale as “do re ma” may lead to a better understanding of minor.

The point of the movable do system is to allow this flexibility, and opening the door to multiple ways of understanding harmonic and melodic concepts. Whether you teach new scales to students using natural minor as the basis is a matter of choice. There is some validity to teaching the scales using a consistent syllable as the root. Clearly it does create some consistency! But then again it gives no insight into the modal nature of musical relationships involved in “relative major/minor” which is better demonstrated by using LA or even RE or MI rooted minor scales.

The point is movable DO as opposed to fixed-DO systems allow that flexibility.

The difficulty is that so many European cultures have long used the same syllables as the American “A, B, C” fixed system. Seems to me the Kodály folks should have come up with another set of syllables for the movable system, but that’s all water under the bridge, and we English speaking Americans have the privilege of not having the conflict, giving us maximum flexibility.

So Bennett – you aren’t in favor of “fixed-do” — just in favor of teaching scales with a movable do system in which the root is always thought of as “DO.” That seems a good idea, but I would hope that you would also go on to point out the existence of LA and even other rooted systems as students become more sophisticated in their understanding.

In the Kodály system, when teaching young kids from scratch, though, your system, Bennett, is MORE complicated, because you would have to teach all the chromatic syllables before learning the scales. Once kids are aware of the pentatonic DO RE MI SO LA, they can right away learn the minor pentatonic by just singing the same syllables beginning on LA. As you see consistency is in the eye of the beholder – the context. The power of what is meant by “movable DO” is its flexibility to accommodate many approaches to understanding!

Those who point out the challenges of using movable do in a context of rapidly shifting tonal centers are missing the point entirely. It’s not about singing the correct syllable or the correct number! Life is not a Music 30 lab test! Whether you are using movable do, or you shift to fixed do, and in which exact moments, is not of the least importance. It’s about building an automatic cerebral connection between the written note and its associated sound, or vice versa.