Introduction: Organic Growth

Hello there, solfa students!

Week 1 assignments
Rising Level 2's: Select 2 examples from Ottman, ch. 9 to read each day
Rising Level 3's: Select 2 examples from Ottman, 13.26-13.51 to read each day
Everyone: read my pearls of wisdom below....

You may be thinking to yourselves, "Solfa is SOOOO the last thing on my mind right now. I don't even know where my tuning fork is, and my Ottman is still in the trunk of my car." I get it, believe you me. But, if you're anything like your solfa teacher, it won't just be this week or month that slips by before you think about it all again...all of a sudden it'll be June! I've learned this about myself, so I try to make a concerted effort right away to keep solfa on my front burner. Kodály himself had a lot to say about this sort of thing...he likened musical growth to a garden's growth, and pointed out the laughability of a gardener abandoning her/his plot for an extended period of time, expecting to find everything in the same condition months later. What would our theoretical gardener find? Weeds, overgrowth, insects, and general disrepair, I believe. Kodály's point was that there is no such thing as a standstill in musicianship...you're either moving forward or you're regressing.

Similarly, in his book "Outliers", Malcolm Gladwell discusses the ingredients of success in a wide variety of fields and situations. One non-success story has to do with the traditional 3-month school summer vacation and its disastrous effects for children from underprivileged backgrounds. Gladwell goes so far as to blame most of the scholastic achievement gap between wealthy and impoverished families on this extended break, claiming that children in privileged families generally gain ground during the summer and return to school in the fall knowing more than when they left. Children of less privilege, Gladwell claims, tend to spend their summers in free recreation without necessarily using any of the skills they gained in the previous grade, and therefore they forget a lot of what they learned and have to re-learn it in the fall.

And, just to ride my Gladwell train to the end of its tracks, in the first part of his book, Mr. Gladwell describes the lives of successful computer giants (i.e. Bill Gates), lawyers, musicians, etc., and discovers they have only a few things in common:

Being born at the right time in a situation that allowed them to pursue mastery

and

10,000 hours of practice in order to achieve mastery

The 10,000 hour thing is what I'm after...there aren't 10,000 hours to spend in a 3-week summer course...even if you literally spent all 3 summers doing nothing but solfa and never sleeping, you'd get a measley 1512 hours. So, I think it's fair to say that, in order to achieve mastery, y'all need to log some hours on your own. I would be thrilled if each of you would spend 15, or even 10 minutes a day doing solfa throughout the year, and I am certain that you would be shocked at what a huge difference that would make for you. Now, when I say, "doing solfa," I don't mean just anything. I mean using your vocabulary of solfa in a focused way at the highest level you're comfortable using it. That's the way to maintain your skills and perhaps even gain ground between now and next July. Will it always be what you want to do? Probably not. But, could you do your whole day's worth during the commercial breaks of a 1-hour network TV show? Yes....that's what the "mute" button is for!

So, I challenge you....take your educational investment seriously, and take the time you need to make yourself a conversational solfeggist extraordinaire! You'll never regret it.