On Feb 9, 2006, at 6:09 AM, Ken Moore wrote:
Movable Do may help some people in singing by ear or from memory, but it doesn't help playing.
It absolutely helps playing. It helps one pitch the note before producing it, which is essential on almost all instruments, but particularly so for voice and brass. It is also very helpful for transposing and playing by ear (which, as a musician playing a lot of jazz, I do quite a bit of.) Understand me when I say that I am not solfeging to myself when I play - that was just the tool that taught me scale relationships.
For that I need to turn the sound of an interval into a note name, which I usually do directly (i.e. not via the name of the interval).
You DON'T need to translate, except when you do it out loud for classroom purposes, any more than you need to hear the sound of a word when you read English to yourself. What movable do does (as David F. said) is teach scale relationships. You don't necessarily need the syllable for that, but it is a means to an end.
There seem to be many different mental processes for the same musical functions, arrived at either by accident, or deliberately taught in some musical traditions. For pitch, I don't know of any evidence for a clear winner. For time values and rhythm, the French tradition seems to give better results than the English one. In particular, English amateur musicans include many who are extremely weak in this area.
I mentioned before that the French music students in Montreal solfege circles around the English ones. But I still maintain that if movable do were taught with the same rigour with which the French colleges teach fixed do, that movable do would prevail as the most useful pitch tool (for those lacking perfect pitch.)
As for rhythm, there are many who are not quick at decoding the rhythmic values properly, not just the English! Kodaly's "tah, tee-tee, teery-teery, tri-ple-tee" method (for quarter, eighths, sixteenths, and triplets) was so effective with me as a developing musician that I still find myself using those syllables when explaining rhythms to students. The training I got (twice a week in school) made it almost impossible to sing the wrong rhythm when using those syllables. I liken it to that test where the word "Red" is written in blue letters, but you are asked to say the name of the colour, not read the word. Most native English speakers find it hard not to say "Red" - that is, to read the word instead of looking at the colour. Counting and subdivision only take one so far; eventually one just has to recognise the rhythms as something one has seen before and knows how it sounds.
Christopher _______________________________________________ Finale mailing list [email protected] http://lists.shsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/finale
