SOLFAGE

What is Solfège?

Solfège (or Do-Re-Mi) is like the alphabet for music  - just as the ABC’s provide the building blocks for reading, solfège provides the building blocks for musical education. It is one of the most widely known and popular systems of teaching pitch, which brings together listening, singing and in due course, playing music. Each note of the musical scale is given a different syllable – Do, Re, Mi, Fa, So, La and Ti. With their open vowel endings, the solfège names are much easier to vocalise than traditional 8-note scale names: C-D-E-F-G-A-B-C, which have lots of sounds that strain the voice (eeee sounds). What’s more, singing letter names for a musical scale has the potential to confuse young children who are learning the alphabet in the context of language.

TREBLE CLEF 

The Treble Clef spirals around the second line from the bottom. This spiral tells us that notes on this line are G.From here we can figure out the other note names simply by going forward or backward through the musical alphabet: A,B,C,D,E,F,G

BASS CLEF

The Bass Clef has two dots, above and below the second line from the top. The dots tell us that this line is F.

What is solfège for?

The idea behind the solfège system is to help develop pitch memory, which is the most basic type of musical memory. It does so by requiring the student to hear the note in their mind’s ear, thus honing their listening and aural skills. Because solfège focuses on the use of voice (rather than an instrument) it is the perfect way for young children to learn pitch naturally.

There are two types of pitch – perfect and relative pitch. Perfect pitch (also called absolute pitch) is  the ability to identify or re-create a given musical note without the help of a reference tone. Famous singers with perfect pitch include Michael Jackson, Mariah Carey and Ella Fitzgerald. Relative pitch is the ability to recognize and produce pitches in relation to each other.

There are also two methods of teaching solfège – the ‘fixed do’ system and the ‘movable do’ system. The ‘fixed’ do system is based upon the C major scale and is more in line with building perfect pitch because C is always sung as “Do” and A is always sung as La etc. However, with the Movable-Do solfège system “Do” is sung as the root (first note) of the scale so any scale or key can be used, thus aiding the development of relative pitch.

Whether you use the ‘fixed do’ or ‘‘movable do’, both systems are tools for helping to develop the muscle memory for pitch, especially if you add the Curwen/Glover hand signs.

Solfège chart showing the hand signs

During the 1840’s, John Spencer Curwen developed hand signs to go with the solfège syllables (do re mi, etc.) based on Sarah Glover’s Manual of the Norwich Sol-fa System. Later, Hungarian pioneer of children’s music education Zoltán Kodály, adapted the hand signs slightly and integrated them into his teaching methods.

This solfège chart show the hand signs. Hand signs allow children to actually see the height or depth of the pitch. The low “do” begins at your midsection. Each hand sign (pitch) is then made above the previous one. Thus, you have the hand signs going up when the pitch goes up. The upper “do” is at eye level. The reverse is done on the way back down and that’s a little trickier.