Speaking of a needle pulling thread ...

There is a marvelous French song for children:

"J'ai perdu le do de ma clarinette,
J'ai perdu le do de ma clarinette,
ah, si Papa savait ça,
tra la la,
il dirait, il chantrait,
Au pas camarade!"

I lost the do of my clarinette
Ah, if Papa knew
He'd say, he'd sing,
"Hep hep camarade".

And then the next verse

"I lost the do, the re, the mi of my clarinette"

Then

"I lost the do, the re, the mi, the fa, the sol of my clarinette."

And so on ...

Sol, a needle pulling thread! Really!

Ah! It took me a few minutes to realize what you have written. Is this so? Pray tell!

I think so. Actually I think there might be three systems. This was discussed to death in the humungous thread Currawong alluded to.

It would be helpful to know what the three systems are, if there are three.

I have never used any kind of solfege. As I explained elsewhere, I was a part of an experemental class, in college, where students were allowed to use any system they chose. They were graded solely on their ability to look at a score and sing it. Some students did what I did. They just hummed or used made up syllables (scat or "la-la-la").

However, those who use fixed do used this system:

Do di re ri fa fi so si la li ti do, ascending

Do ti te la le so se fa mi me re ra do, descending

I never used these. I just observed others using them.

I assumed this was a alf-hassed attempt to adapt a fundmentally diatonic system to one that was more chromatic one. For me it seemed to be the worst of two words. I utterly rejected it.

But I do believe it exists.

.

Gary, I looked up solfege and solmization, and got a whole slew of approaches under the same name. I think it would be hard to tell what those people learned, and how they had learned it because by that time they were in university using what they had gotten who knows how. Is that plausible?

What I learned was very simple and basic. The teacher pointed to a chart that looked like the one on the left. On the right I have written from memory the types of things we would sing. They are patterns rather than random things. There was no reading of music at this stage. These were sung by following where the pointer went. However, the patterns we practised are ones commonly found in music, and they are also going along chords as well as the scale.

If I try to reconstruct it, then we internalized aurally the kinds of patterns we would see visually in written music and this worked for any key. When we read music we are using three sets of senses: visual, aural, and tactile. I suppose that they have to come into balance. This particular sequence of experience made mine come in the way they did. I had a sense of the patterns in music aurally before I got it in notation form, and the two worked together.

It's one way. It probably isn't "the" way, and it probably only works well for a certain type of music.

The thing that strikes me is that this came first. If you try to learn that kind of solfege after years of reading music the ordinary way, and do it by looking at written music, then wouldn't your usual habit interfere?

This is for anyone who has worked in either kind of solfege. I came across this by chance while looking up Westphalia for my work. It must be sung in fixed do. The singers actually sing the words "fa re fa si la sol fa fa" which my mind immediately wanted to rename "sol mi sol do ti la sol sol..." in movable do. It is by pitch, and is in Bb major.