On 8 Feb 2006 at 12:58, Phil Daley wrote: > At 2/8/2006 12:30 PM, David W. Fenton wrote:
> >Put another way, when you know you need a fifth, you think "Do-Sol", > >when you need a fourth, "Sol-Do" (upward), or any other diatonic > >occurrence of the particular intervals. > > Only if you learned solfege first. If you learned to read notes > first, you think fifths, fourths etc. I learned note names first. I learned solfege as a freshman at Oberlin. Solfege works for me exactly the way you describe it. Note names and intervals do nothing for me in terms of sight signing, except as a backup. I don't think it's a matter of when you learned solfege, but how well you learned it and whether or not you were taught to use it to analyze scale degree function, as I was. I also taught sight-singing as a student tutor for 3 of my years as a student at Oberlin. That, probably more than my freshman year in ear training class, taught me more about how solfege works with regard to scale degree function than anything else. It's now ingrained in me at a level that is beyond conscious thought. Note names are too, but they are just abstract, and don't carry with them the same tonal structural implications. To me, movable Do is all about hearing tonality, a framework of a key, and that is a much better way to signt read tonal music than mere intervals. With pure interval singing, any error in the chain means you're off from then on. But with scale degree function, you can miss one or more notes and still get back on track later on, because you're point of reference is the *key* itself, not just the previous pitch that you've sung. -- David W. Fenton http://dfenton.com David Fenton Associates http://dfenton.com/DFA/ _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
