I think the point is that untrained ear singers may have a better ear for intervals than for absolute pitch. The shapes are an indication of the interval between the note to be sung and the tonic or subdominant - the 4 shapes correspond to fa, sol, la, and mi - a unison, tone, major third, and augmented 4th to the fa. As the whole scale corresponds to this pattern, repeated in whole from fa and in part from do:
Tonic sol-fa Do re mi, fa sol la ti 4-shape: fa sol la, fa sol la mi You can thus give a good idea of any diatonic tune using the 4 shapes - mediaeval tetrachords were the same idea - they often referred to fingers on a hand as a mnemonic. Don't think of fa as automatically the tonic or the subdominant, as lots of shape note tunes are modal. See Star of the east, in the wikipedia article. John -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of [email protected] Sent: 12 January 2011 09:05 To: [email protected]; [email protected] Cc: [email protected] Subject: [NSP] Re: Still off topic: Off-topic request for Hymnbook >easier than straining the eye to see if that little black >circle is an A or a C and how do I then find that pitch on the >spot. Fair enough, but for someone whose vision is as bad as mine, it's easier to see where a blob is (on which line or between which lines?) than to discern the precise shape of the blob (which gives no additional information anyway, so why bother?). And why should shape be easier to correlate to a given pitch than vertical position? The notes in conventional notation (which is identical to shape-note notation minus the shapes) give the visual aid of "going up and down on the stave" while the shapes could be interchangeable by applying different conventions. Note for nothing is a scale called, literally, a "tone ladder" in, for example, Dutch and German. I personally also have a problem with tablature. Conventional notation is like a picture of the music; tablature only a picture of the instrument. All this FWIW, as ever. C To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
