I've been talking to piano teachers around Australia about teaching their beginners, and most teachers here do use the American methods - Alfred, Hal Leonard, Piano Adventures, recently the Premier method from Alfred, less recently Bastien...

There have been many discussions in this forum where I've seen teachers talking about using Movable Do: are there Movable Do method books that any of you use? Or is your use of Movable Do something you 'add' to other materials you are using?

I use movable do, but I don't know of any piano method book which uses it (I do know of a recorder method book that does, however!). I incorporate it into the other materials I use, including some of my own.

I came across one method book for young children which claims to use Kodaly principles and so I thought it might use movable do, but on looking at the website - Dogs and Birds - I find they use animal names for the notes, and the children sing these, which really makes it more of a fixed do method.

Hmm, interesting. It just suddenly occurred to me today that I'd *never* seen a movable do piano method.....

I would quite like to use a fixed Do piano method. I experimented with a new beginner young child recently; teaching her fixed Do solfege. Trouble is I don't know it terribly well (never used it at all and had to look up the sounds and make a chart that I can see during lessons). i realised that I have to practise it myself until more natural, and also integrate it better with my usual methods. Maybe I'll just revert to ABC again.

I can't imagine using movable Do. I grew up with ABCD...

(Australian teacher of beginners)

Good point, Canonie, I can't imagine not calling A A either!! But even so, I'm amazed that so far no one knows of a movable do 'method'.....

Back in ancient history when I was in elementary school, we had daily music class. We were taught do, re, mi, etc. relative to scale degrees of the major scale (no instruments, just singing).

Never heard of fixed do until recently.

Well I hope that i am able to teach students how to internalise the scale degrees in spite of not training them in movable do. Hmmm better remember to make sure that everyone does at least some transposing this term.

Hurray for Holidays; a good time for pondering and preparing (and practising!).

Forte has a fixed do method called Music Munchkins. Urrghh...

(And at this point I bite my tongue. Hard.)

Laughing at the hard tongue biting..... Fixed do doesn't interest me anyway.....

The closest thing to a true moveable do method in the US is Music Moves for Piano by Marilyn Lowe:

http://www.musicmovesforpiano.com/

I think there was one under development in the UK at one point (someone was working on a Kodaly-based piano method as a dissertation project) but I don't know if it ever found a publisher.

I don't know of such a method, but Bastien does teach transposition early (at least in the adult method), and makes it clear early that every major key has the same structure so that the student can move from key to key easily.

Elene

I've never really understood why someone would prefer 'moveable Do' over 'fixed Do' when teaching note names. The notes on the staff have to have secure, permanent names that students will remember. When using letter names, you don't scramble the names to fit the key do you?

I would think 'moveable Do' could only be used in addition to a letter name musical language already used by a student.

For 'fixed Do' I only know of Yamaha and Harmony Road programs that use solfege as their musical language.

It's not used to teach note names. It teaches sale degrees.

"Doe a deer, a female deer. re ,,,,,,

Yes, so IN ADDITION to a set musical language.

'Fixed Do' for notereading and internalizing actual pitch.

'Moveable Do' for scale degrees/intervals.

My mom grew up in rural south China. In school, she was taught to sing in doh-re-mi. She could never remember the lyrics to songs. I grew up listening to her sing all the songs in doh-re-mi, even the songs that I brought home from school. It is now ingrained in me so much that when I listen to music in the major or minor diatonic scale, I cannot get away from matching the solfege syllables to the pitch.

If the song modulates, the whole scale is repositioned to a new doh. When we get to some jazz music, the tonic is identified, and the scale is adapted with the raised or lowered notes. Internally, that translated very well when memorizing and analyzing my piano pieces.

I grew up in a church where the entire hymnal is written out like:

Eb major
1 1 2 3 | 4 - - - etc.

and the entire congregation knows how to read music that way. It's not doh-re-mi, but it's still the concept of a symbol matching the degree of a scale. Notes lower than 1 has a dot at the bottom. Notes higher than 7 has a dot at the top. Eighth notes are underlined. Sixteenth notes are double-underlined.

I don't anything about solfege as a piano method - or specifically applied to piano. I also never had formal training in solfege. But once it got inside my system, it definitely helped with my piano and theory.

May I ask, what do you mean by a movable do piano method? I cannot grasp the idea at all.

Scale degrees instead of notes. Doe is always the tonic no matter what key the piece is in.

I know what movable-do solfège is, but I had the impresion that Elissa means a piano method that uses movable do in some way.

That's just when you can use movable do. Letter names for fixed pitch, movable do solfa for scale degrees. Goes well together because they are used in different contexts.
What doesn't work (or works less well) is to combine fixed and movable do - where the same terminology means two different things.

I'm not answering for Elissa, but I understood her to mean a piano method book that (in addition to teaching letter names as the fixed pitches) teaches the concept of scale degrees and their relationship to each other by using movable do solfa (incorporating singing as well as playing).

currawong's right: but more concretely, imagine a piano method like Piano Adventures or the Alfred Premier method, comprising Lessons Books, Theory Books, Technique, Solos, and so on.... which works with the premise that the relationship between notes (solfege) is the starting point. Does such a method exist? I think not, but I am turning to the wisdom of crowds here in the Piano World Teachers Forum.....

Ah of course - you'd have ABCD note names, then do re mi scale degrees. At the moment I/students sing the numbers out loud ("seven" is annoyingly polysyllabic, "flat seveeeeen" even sillier). But I don't introduce this much or early. I think as a child I internalised scale degrees by singing and playing around with a bit of transposing (not taught in lessons). It's good to remind myself that aural skills will not always happen automatically for students.

MomofB - re number notation, is a minor third indicated with 3- or is there no indication of major or minor in the numbers?

I like the idea of MomOfB.
I do not know any Movable Do Piano Method. If there is one, I would use ABC plus this Movable Do Method instead of Fix-Do.

Minor keys I think were notated with the tonic as 6 with a dot at the bottom. If a note was raised, they'd use a sharp symbol # as in #4. If a note was lowered, they'd use the flat symbol as in b3.

Bear in mind, though, that this was more than 20 years ago, and I think the notation was made for easy typing on a primitive typewriter. In later editions, the music was written out on a staff, with the same notation numbers on top. Still later, the number notations were completely gone.

My point was more that a there were whole masses of people with little training in music (only in elementary school), unable to read the staff or note names, but who could understand degrees of a scale (most of them translating easily to doh-re-mi) and can sing in any key.

try berklee contemporary ear training for modern musicians or soemthin, they use movable do or any of their stuff i believe

Joe84, this doesn't sound like a book designed to be used with beginners/6 year olds!! Or am I mistaken?

I have never used movable do method books but there are two available in Australia that I know of:

"Piano Play" by John Colwill

and

"Piano for Children" by David Banney

Perhaps someone here has used them...

Interesting - I'll keep my eye out for them.

Well, I can't believe I never knew til now that John Colwill had written beginner piano books..... Goodness me!!! I've ordered them in.... Thanks so much for sharing this information!!

Recently I had a piano ped class while going for my Masters, the professor was French. He was of the European fixed "DO" system. In general he felt that who ever invented the mobile DO was an idiot.

Upon much thought, there is no advantage to a mobile DO over a fixed one....