All Levels: Read my sermonette below, then sing:
Rising 2's: Ottman 10.17, 11.1, 11.13, 11.24, 11.25
Rising 3's: Ottman 12.18, 12.20, 12.27, 12.32, 10.76
Rising 4's: Ottman 14.58 (downward stems), 14.58 (upward stems), 14.55 (top voice - mode?), 14.55 (bottom voice), choose one of the above and sing one part while playing the other or call a friend and sing a duet.
Whew! The second week of the second year of my second graduate degree is hereby complete! I hope all of you are happily off and running in your schools and that there are lovely hints of autumn sneaking into the air in your part of the world.
I hope some of you enjoyed last week's little game...this week, I'd like to revisit some basic tenets of what we do in the Kodaly solfa world. Why, you ask? Because academia wields a two-edged sword in the form of a lot of really smart people with a lot of creative ideas, all jammed together into a fairly compact area. At times, this seems to result in the instructor's desire to get right to the "good stuff" and gloss over the basics -- I'm guilty of it, too. It's fun to swim in the deep end of the pool -- it makes everyone feel really good. But, the truth is that we need to function in the shallows first and be certain that we can keep ourselves afloat in a place where our feet can still touch bottom.
At the fair institution I attend, the theory faculty make use of movable do, but with do-based minor and do-based modes. Probably a majority of departments and colleges of music in the U.S. make use of this system. The logic of this system rests upon the notion that it's best if tonic is always called by the same name, and from a strictly cognitive point of view, this is appealing. However, music education is not a study of ideas only, but a study of how to accomplish musical tasks -- specifically in the aural skills classroom, how to translate sounds into symbols and symbols into sounds. To this end, if we are to make use of a particular system in the process of converting sound-symbol and symbol-sound, I propose that any such system should serve both as an aid to the conversion process and an assessment tool of whether the process happened accurately (both sound accuracy and conceptual accuracy -- i.e., did the student make the correct sounds and did the student show that s/he understood what sounds s/he was making).
In my view, fixed-do will definitely act as an assessment tool from a cognitive standpoint -- if you call the syllable the wrong note name, it means you don't know where you are for sure (however, a singer could use a note name for 3 pitches within a half-step of one another and technically still be using the right name: do = C, C-sharp, and C-flat). However, it does nothing to facilitate the conversion process (half and whole steps must be accounted for aurally/vocally without a change in syllable to indicate this process), nor does it show the student or teacher in an obvious way whether the student is aurally/vocally correct or not.
Movable-do, while being visually more complicated from the outset (a student must know his/her key signatures in order to apply syllables to a given example), simplifies the process of converting symbol to sound and vice versa by using phonetic sounds as cues to the voice, ear, and brain to produce a particular interval relationship. It is true that a student must learn to apply the syllables differently in different keys, but this is a visual difficulty that a student educated in the visually dominated Western educational system can usually overcome with reasonable practice. Additionally, the application of syllables acts as a form of instant analysis of harmonic function in tonal melodies, creating a means for sound and conceptual accuracy assessment.
Do-based minor and do-based modes require the student to assess the tonic of a given example before singing it. Indeed, this is an advantage in several ways -- the "instant analysis" factor of movable-do is equally simple and straightforward in any case under these conditions. However, the conversion of symbol to sound is more difficult vocally in do-based minor and modes because major key tonality syllables must be altered to indicate changes to the whole and half-step scheme of major tonality vs. anything else. These syllables are frequently less vocal (for example, le is a lowered 6th scale degree and la is the regular 6th scale degree, but the vowel for le is brighter than the vowel for la, and from a vocal standpoint, brighter vowel = higher pitch, which is the opposite of the effect the system is trying to evoke) and the fact that they are alterations of the "normal" syllables creates a lesser muscular/verbal allegiance to an altered syllable than to a "normal" syllable.
La-based minor and relative/comparative modes are used far less than the systems mentioned above, in part because they are considered childish or old-fashioned. And, it is true that from an "instant analysis" standpoint, vesting more than one syllable with the power to be the TONIC is more complicated and requires some getting used to. However, by using the key signature as the determining factor for what syllables to apply to which notes, the arrangement of whole and half steps is known to the singer from the outset, which makes the translation of symbol to sound consistently easier regardless of mode (major/minor/Dorian/whatever). And, if the student is as careful to look for the tonic in la-based minor as s/he would have to be to accurately sing an example in do-based minor, cognitive accuracy is also quickly and easily assessed in this system.
The winning argument for me is that children in the United States are trained to use their eyes and the analytical and verbal parts of their brains within an inch of their lives -- both in school and out of school. However, our ears and our voices are typically not nearly so trained, so they require the support of visual, verbal, and cognitive intelligences. Therefore, a system that is more complicated visually, verbally, and cognitively, but less complicated aurally and vocally is what we need to look for to even the score (as it were).
So, that's the story as I see it these days. I don't believe that any system has all the answers, and I do hope I've been fair to all systems in my description of their respective merits and drawbacks. If you feel I've been myopic in some way, I heartily invite discussion. At this moment, I believe the most important thing is to be aware of a system, any system, and to have one's endgame in mind when selecting tasks for students: we are working to raise up the next generation of independent, thoughtful, accomplished, artistically aware, heartfelt musicians, and the most menial of musical tasks is still an important part of their education. Therefore, we move proudly from the known to the unknown, we hold our heads high when we and our students thoroughly understand that which is simple, because we know the truth: the simple is the only real key to the complex. And, despite the fact that I thoughtlessly and flagrantly break his tenets on a constant basis, I will close with a quote from my favorite armchair philosopher, Mr. Frederich William Dietrich (aka my big brother, who has the most German name in world history):
"If you can't say it simply, you don't know much about it."
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