The Case for Movable “Do” in Classroom Ear Training

Posted on Feb 4, 2009 | 40 comments
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The Case for Movable “Do” in Classroom Ear Training

Against my better judgment, I’m jumping into the fray regarding methods used in the teaching of sight singing. Normally I try to stay away from such conflicts, but I can only take so much disparagement of my beloved Movable Do system.  The last straw is the discovery of this web site, which contains misleading information designed to promote the sale of a...

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Dusting Off My Kodály

Posted on Aug 6, 2007 | 2 comments
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Dusting Off My Kodály

My latent, inner musicianship nerd has resurfaced lately. I am lucky to have had a very high level of musicianship training, largely based on the Kodály Method, which actually is more of a philosophy than a method. It’s mostly associated with the teaching of small children, but I encountered it first as a college freshman. I’ve been trying to...

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Learning Atonal Music

Posted on Oct 14, 2006 | 6 comments
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Poking among some neglected subscriptions in Google Reader, I just came across this interesting approach to learning how to sing atonal, or otherwise difficult, music. This is from The Concert, the blog of a New York soprano. In a nutshell, the idea is to break the piece into smaller tasks, the first being to concentrate on one small section at a time. Within...

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The Names of Things

Posted on Aug 30, 2006 | 3 comments
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Frank Pesci raised an interesting question on his interesting blog today. I wanted to comment, but his site doesn’t allow comments from non-”Blogger”-ers. The basic question is: Why is “do”, “C.” Meaning, why has the default understanding of the solfege syllable “do” become synonymous with the English...

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