The Case for Movable “Do” in Classroom Musicianship

Against my better judgment, I’m jumping into the fray regarding methods used in the teaching of sight singing. Normally I try to stay away from such conflicts, but I can only take so much disparagement of my beloved Movable Do system.  The last straw is the discovery of this web site, which contains misleading information designed to promote the sale of a book.

(Warning: This post is intended for musicianship and theory nerds. If you are not in that category, your eyes will glaze over shortly.)

Dusting Off My Kodály

My latent, inner musicianship nerd has resurfaced lately. I am lucky to have had a very high level of musicianship training, largely based on the Kodály Method, which actually is more of a philosophy than a method. It’s mostly associated with the teaching of small children, but I encountered it first as a college freshman. I’ve been trying to rebuild my memories of how I was taught, and how I might use similar techniques as a teacher.

Learning Atonal Music

Poking among some neglected subscriptions in Google Reader, I just came across this interesting approach to learning how to sing atonal, or otherwise difficult, music. This is from The Concert, the blog of a New York soprano.

In a nutshell, the idea is to break the piece into smaller tasks, the first being to concentrate on one small section at a time. Within each section, strip the material of text and rhythm, only focusing at first on the pitches. Basically, learn the string of pitches one interval at time.

The Names of Things

Frank Pesci raised an interesting question on his interesting blog today. I wanted to comment, but his site doesn’t allow comments from non-”Blogger”-ers. The basic question is:

Why is “do”, “C.” Meaning, why has the default understanding of the solfege syllable “do” become synonymous with the English character “C” (and not “A”)?

And some related points are:

A few things need to be sorted out before we begin. First is the fact that only English speaking countries use the English alphabet (A through G with accidentals) to delineate pitches. Next, we will forego the initial usage of Guido of Arezzo’s system of, essentially, movable “ut,” and focus on the common acceptance of the fixed “do” system, with “do” corresponding to the note associated with the English letter “C.”

First, a correction: It’s not true that only English speaking countries use letter names for pitches. They do so in Germany and in Central/Eastern Europe as well. You may sometimes see “B” for what we call “B Flat” and “H” for what we call “B”.

As for the main question, I don’t have all the answers, but I suspect it has something to do with the letter names system being based on the minor scale (in movable do, the minor scale starts on “la”). If we equate “la” to “A”, the relative major is “C”, or “do”. There’s no real significance to the letter “C”, and the answer lies not in fixed “do”, but actually in movable “do”. So, whereas Guido d’Arezzo’s system of syllables uses the major scale as a basis (do [ut], re, mi, etc.), letter names use the minor scale.

I’m no musicologist; this is just a guess. Please comment if you have a more thorough explanation.

By the way, the origin of those solfege syllables is explained pretty well here.

If you know Frank, please pass this along. Meanwhile, I’m adding him to “Other Blogs”.