Part 1: Karaoke Solfege-Style Introduction
These blog posts reference a short karaoke solfege video that physically demonstrates the musical equivalent of the alphabet, which enables learners to gain a deep understanding of the structure of music.
Contents
Part 1: Karaoke Solfege-Style Introduction (this post)
Part 4: Karaoke Solfege at Music Institutions
This is an early preview of material to add to the official second edition of The Unstoppable Musician. Once the official second edition is released on Amazon, the first edition (originally titled Solfege Teaching Guide on Amazon) will be permanently retired.
Imagine what it would be like trying to learn to read and write without first learning the alphabet. Similarly with music, it is difficult to impossible to become a musician without first doing the musical equivalent of learning the alphabet. In the music world, this involves singing “do re mi” while simultaneously conducting time. If you can do this, you have a foundation with which you can become a musician. If not, you will struggle with anything music related.
About the demonstration video:
It’s less than three minutes and shows everything we learned about the musical alphabet, using the first of many popular songs on Youtube. This Karaoke Solfege project can include a varied range of genres of music to show how accessible this is, and that it can be applied to just about anything. While the tools used to study the musical alphabet are elemental and foundational, this demonstration video is more advanced than what we were doing as students in solfege class. Think of this as a guidepost for where you can go with this.
I hadn’t sung in weeks, maybe well over a month. I threw together sheet music in Sibelius, did three warm up runs, hit record, and captured this recording in one take. In this form, this is much more representative of what we were doing in solfege class and allows for a broader discussion than with a clean performance.
To become a musician, you must:
Learn about the structure of music by learning the musical alphabet, using the voice as an instrument
Learn the mechanics of playing an instrument, and learn efficient practice methods
When learning about the structure of music, we learn about pitches and how they move through time by externalizing the relevant metrics needed to learn this. Sure, everyone can sing and recognize Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, but what are the pitches? We name them: do do sol sol la la sol — fa fa mi mi re re do —. This way, not only does everyone learn what the pitches are, people who know the musical alphabet and see “do do sol sol la la sol” will immediately recognize oh, that’s Twinkle Twinkle Little Star. And they will also eventually see the music in their heads.
Because we use our voices as instruments, we extrapolate out all of the complexity needed to learn a new instrument, like having to develop independence of the fingers and hands for a piano keyboard, or learning how not to sound like a sick cat when playing a violin. Even voice practice itself becomes more targeted depending on what the student is trying to learn, as the demonstration video shows. Singers who listen to this video may well think:
I can sing better than that
My voice is stronger and I have more endurance than that
There are all sorts of wobbles that would be fixed if the performer practiced more, recorded more takes, and released a more polished version
When learning the musical alphabet and learning about the structure of music, all of that goes out the window, except where it relates to mistakes made due to lack of understanding of the structure of music. If you were taking voice lessons, you might focus on things like correct posture, expanding the rib cage, relaxing the shoulders and neck, opening up the sinuses, breathing properly, enunciating clearly, etc. And true, when studying the musical alphabet, we at least want to learn how to sing without injuring ourselves. But three-year-olds encountering the musical alphabet for the first time won’t have the endurance, power, etc. but it’s OK, they just need to show their teacher they are beginning to grasp / improving their understanding of the structure of music.
In fact, some things may work against more experienced singers who, for example, have developed vibrato. When learning the musical alphabet, it is more important to learn to establish pitches accurately, and this is easier to do with less or no vibrato. Our high school chorale director used to joke if someone had strong vibrato, that “you could drive a mack truck through that.”
What do we want to accomplish during solfege classes? We want to learn how to encounter brand new music and quickly break it down. This process is very important, and can feel overwhelming when we first try to do this in solfege class. But the process never changes, so we keep encountering brand new, enjoyable short songs starting from simple to more complex, and practice this process over and over and over again until it is imbued in our automatic memory, both in our minds and bodies.
Practicing songs to have the most polished performance isn’t the point. Polishing the process of encountering new music and quickly breaking it down is the true point of studying the musical alphabet.
In the demonstration video, people may recognize that conducting four quarter notes while simultaneously singing a half note triplet is pretty advanced, so even without an instrument, this can be used to study fairly complex musical ideas.
Studying the musical alphabet can be fun for people who think they hate practicing and therefore could never become a musician. Do you think any of us at French School cracked open our solfege books between classes? Oh Heck no. And our teacher Yvonne Combe knew this, and expected it. We practiced encountering new music and breaking it down during solfege class.
Why is the French School methodology so effective for learning the musical alphabet?
In accounting, people manually tracking expenses often used a double entry bookkeeping system which would help them catch mistakes more easily. In learning about the structure of music by singing named pitches while simultaneously conducting, we’re doing a similar thing.
If someone were to sing Twinkle Twinkle Little Star with the lyrics, everyone might recognize the song, but not necessarily know what the pitches are. When we name the pitches, we can not only identify if someone knows the correct pitches, we can hear the pitches being sung and determine if they match the names. Teachers now have a diagnostic tool that will tell them if students understand how to read music, if they are able to accurately voice pitches, and if they sing those pitches at the right times. What we do not measure, we can neither understand nor improve, either in ourselves or our students.
If a student learned that Twinkle Twinkle is do do sol sol la la sol — they may say the correct sequence of named pitches, but sing the wrong pitches. This indicates they could use more help with ear training.
If a student has a good ear and can easily sing the correct pitches (maybe even without the aid of an instrument!), but they say the wrong names for the pitches, this may indicate they pick up things more easily by ear but need help with sightreading sheet music and naming pitches correctly.
Someone may fully understand the musical alphabet, but if they haven’t sung in awhile, haven’t practiced, or aren’t fully warmed up, they may rattle off the correct pitch names but not consistently hit the correct pitches.
Someone may fully understand the musical alphabet, but if they do not engage in strong mental play and think ahead, they will have trouble singing pitches accurately. It is very difficult to be accurate if singers are simply reacting in real-time.
A music composer unfamiliar with what is reasonable or unreasonable for a singer to perform may compose something that is difficult or impossible to sing accurately (e.g. too fast, or contains leaps from low to high notes at too great a distance). Or the composer may compose something that is difficult to sing but can be sung by an experienced singer who has practiced and warmed up. The composer listening to the demonstration video and recognizing that the singer cannot always accurately voice the pitches might ask if they want to modify challenging areas so that anyone can sing cold, without requiring warm up and practice.
Like the double entry system used by accountants to help validate and catch mistakes more easily, this methodology for learning the musical alphabet can be used by students to learn more quickly. Say someone has a good ear, but has trouble sightreading. If they sightread incorrectly when running through an exercise, then hear the solution, they will immediately realize they made a mistake. Since they more quickly build an association with a pitch and its name, it may take longer for the eyes to read the music and translate to the correct pitch name, but over time the ear teaches the eye, then one day the ear and eye match and validate through cross-referencing data, tied by the name of the pitch.
Thanks to this double entry system plus a young child’s ability to mimic teachers and more advanced students, that child will begin by parroting correct behaviors. Depending on age, it could be months (with weekly solfege classes), or a year, but at some point, a light bulb will go off, and it’s magical when it happens.