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Thank you, landarrano, for all of the explanations. (And to you and keystring for the compliment to my username. ) It really does help. I was also interested in it for my own education. I am always reassessing how I teach and considering different ideas. I like the idea of a music school where general music concepts are taught in a class and specific instrumental instruction is given individually. I don't know if it would work where I live, but I like to gather the information.

And, Gary, I think it would be like singing to letter names--which I was required to do in college. We sometimes used letter names, sometimes moveable do, sometimes "la." The letter names and fixed-do serve the reading purposes well since most instruments relate to "key names."

Yes, if you sing "Bb" or "B" or "B#" and switch to a fixed do that also represents the same thing. For me those would have to correspond to:

"si bemol", "si" and "si dièse". The obvious problem in singing (sight-singing) is the length of those syllables.

http://www.library.yale.edu/cataloging/music/keylang.htm

Ironically, German is the language in which you could sing note names most easily.

I only use note names, any system, to make sure that someone else (another musician or student) is looking at, referrencing, hearing the same pitch:

"No, C#, Cx (C double sharp)." Other than that I simply hum notes, no names, visualizing either the piano or another instrument I have played and taught (trumpet, lower brass).

If I am teaching someone who knows key names as used in Spanish, I simply add bemol and sostenido to the common syllables, do re mi fa so(l) la si...

Excellent observation! So obvious, how could I have not seen! Those silly Frenchies! You gotta love 'em, they just go on knocking their heads against the solfège wall! They must get government subsidies for it, there can be no other explanation.

Come to think of it, and by logical extension, the staff itself is clearly devised to teach NOT to read.

Seriously though, I think that the pronouncing of "Si" whether the note is b-natural or b-flat or b-sharp, has a more important basis than simply to avoid pronouncing clumsly things like "si-bémol" or "si-double-bémol".

This habit serves a fundamental pedagocial role, laying the foundation of the notion of tonality and the scale as the internal structure of a tonality. A note is never just a note, it is a degree in a tonality.

I understand that, looking at it from the outside, singing "B" when the note is B-flat or B-sharp seems strange. But as with a foreign language, many things seem strange at the first contact, and then after some time you get used to it and then with more time you realize that it has its charm and its value and that finally it has helped you to better understand something of you mother tongue.

Besides, this is something that everyone does on a daily basis with spoken language. Every vowel has multiple pronounciations, but when you spell you say the name of each letter without modification. If you spell "read" present tense or "read" preterit, you say the same thing. And looking at it inversly, when reading you know by the context whether "read" is in the present and is to be pronounces "read" or if it is in the preterit and is to be pronounced "read".

There is another characteristic element of musical education in France, which is singing in a chorus as a sort of complement to the solfège class. Kids begin singing in unison. Canons generally follow as a first step towards polyphony. Then singing in several voices. All of this is supported by a score but the objective is also to develop the ear as we say, so at elementary levels the pieces tend to be quite simple and are quickly memorized.

A last general characteristic of musical education takes place in middle schools as a part of the general obligatory curriculum. In France, the schools years count down to 1, whereas in the US they start at 1 and count up. They coincide at 6th grade, at 11 years old, middle school. Starting in 6th grade, all students have to have a recorder and there is a one hour music lesson every week where they do singing and an introdution to note reading, and the recorder. The teachers are all graduates from a conservatory and are often quite good musicians.

Many years in the past, solfège was part of the national school curriculum. But over the years, that has been whittled away and the recorder is kind of the last stand.

My daughter's music teacher obliges the students to have a recorder with baroque fingering, because the tuning is better even if the fingerings are sometimes more complicated.

This would be the recorder that has one hole in the bottom holes, rather than two holes, correct? Because the holes are different, the way the pitches come out are different, so more complex fingering is required for some notes.

The fact of the teachers having a background in music is not something to be taken for granted in the public school system. Germany does recorders too. How about other countries? The advantage of recorders is that they are cheap and easily affordable. Their disadvantage is that being in tune is only approximate and hard to do, especially if you switch octaves.

I love recorders and I've got tons of them. I pick them up at rummage sales. Since everybody in France gets one in middle school, later they all appear at rummage sales. I get them for 50 cents or a euro. I have one excellent one that I got for 50 cents a few years ago, a good quality German flute, in pear wood.

I didn't know what baroque fingering means, I had no idea at all. I sent my daughter to school with a different flute every week, and every week she came back saying that it was not a baroque flute. Then, like Keystring I surmised that it means that there is only one hole in the bottom hole. My daughter took one and back she came with it, rejected again !

In fact the only baroque flute that I had was my precious wooden one. I play it myself, and I was saving it for my daughter, but I didn't want her to take it to school. But off to school it went, but the teacher rejected it because certain holes are too spaced for a small hand.

But what the heck made it a baroque flute ?

In fact it is the third and fourth holes from the bottom that are different from a modern flute. As a result the fingerings are slightly different and a little more complex, but it is possible to be in tune. Whereas on a flute with modern fingering it is pretty much impossible, which I had actually remarked with my many flutes.

So the following weekend I found a nice Yamaha flute with baroque fingering in a rummage sale for 1 euro. Not far from my daughter's school, so I guess that the girl that sold it had the same teacher. We also got a big stack of books.

There are very good plastic flutes widely available here. Thy cost 7 or 8 euros in a stationary store. Now they come from Asia. But there had been for decades manufacturers of good quality plastic flutes in a number of European countries.

That is very interesting, landorrano. Thank you for explaining.

By "flute", do you still mean "recorder"? To me "flute" usually means specifically the "transverse flute" (apparently in French, "flûte traversière"), that you hold sideways. "Recorder" is used for what I believe you would call in French a "flûte à bec", that you hold in front of you.

As far as I am aware regular (i.e. transverse) flutes are perfectly well able to be in tune, presumably due to the Boehm system of keys.

No. The other explanation is that you have limited knowledge and that you are not seeing what is "coming down the road" later. And I'm not saying that my knowledge in regard to the exact way "sight-singing" is taught in France is complete. But the goal is to be able to sing any melody, any part (full score) and to hear exactly what is iny score (without playing it) or transcribe what you hear, without ever having seen the music.

In addition, it is vital for pianists (keyboard players) to have rock-solid links between the "circles on the page" and the keys.

That's a ton of skills to master. I would say that ANY system that gets these things done is is valid, including the one you are describing, but I'm also trying to point out that something very diatonic, perhaps Mozart, may work great with one system, but Bartok or Schoenberg may not.

That is utterly wrong. A note most definitely can be "just a note". You are thinking only of tonality. Try singing a tone-row, where the purpose of the row is to destroy any tonal center. In such a case you either fall back on perfect pitch or each tone is relative by interval to the one proceeding it. And there is a whole universe of music between Common Practice music and Schoenberg.

Guilty as charged, I am thinking only of tonality. Solfège deals with tonality.

Yes. A recorder is, of course, a kind of flute, although in English flute seems to mean exclusively transversal flute.

"Flûte à bec" means flute with a beak.

The particular approach to teaching music via solfege that you have described deals with the tonality of a specific system of music that corresponds roughly to the Baroque era and music that was written in this manner. That means that any music which is not structured that way will not fit.

Actually -- are there any teachers who live in France who can clarify whether what Landorrano has described is how music is taught throughout France, or whether this is a particular approach that some schools might use in France? This is something that I haven't manage to get clear.

There is a piano forum in France called pianomajeur.net pianomajeur.net

Naturally it is in French but I am quite certain that you will get many responses if you formulate a question in English.

I already heard complex music in my head by the time I started college -- (Audiation). I thought everyone could do that, or any good musician, and I was shocked to find out that most could not.

I was part of an experimental group that was in class together for two years for music history, theory and "sight-singing". I was exempted from sight-singing because I was able to simply hum anything from the most advanced materials before the class even started, but because I was part of the group, I continued to come, observing other students struggling. In general, the students who could do what I could do were all pianists who played another instrument. I remember that one was a singer, another a violinist who was also a singer, another a brass player.

My conclusion is that playing piano and a second instrument builds the ear in a way that nothing else does (the second instrument can be "voice"). The worst sight-singers were the vocalists who played no other instrument.

Another teacher who taught using movable do admitted, privately, that what HE actually used was the connection to French horn, his instrument, mentally feeling fingers depressing valves and hearing the pitches as he felt them in his lips.

For this reason I am behind any system that helps people learn to hear, but I feel that naming notes is a totally separate issue. It doesn't matter if you say B, si or ti (using fixed names), but without one of those links to the key we call those names there will be an immediate problem when key signatures are introduced, among other things.

The blurring of these two very different concepts here is what has bothered me. Deciding to call a key either G, or so, or sol is child's play. Deciding on a system to aid people in hearing is immensely complex, and only a fool thinks that there is one way and ONLY one way to accomplish that.

I speak French and will happily post the question to pianomajeur. First I'm checking the pianomajeur.net archives, searching for "solfege" and "solfège". Just on a quick scan, one of the first threads is from a person studying piano with 1/2 hour piano, 1 1/2 hours solfege per week at a conservatory, and then an additional 1 hour per week piano with a private teacher. And there's a long thread on "Comment apprendre le piano à des enfants ?" ("How to teach the piano to children?")

So, what would we like to ask? Something like: How is sightsinging and eartraining taught to music students in France, and how do they deal with accidentals and non-common-practice music -- e.g. blues, whole tone, atonal?

Here is what I am understanding from Landorrano's descriptions. The fact of note names being Do Re Mi instead of C D E is clear to everyone, ofc. Then there is this reference to "tonality" in conjunction to why in F major, Bb is called Si just like B is called Si. I understand what is being said. The idea is that what you are really focusing on are the degrees in a particular key. So this "B" is like saying "the fourth note up from the Tonic - or "the fourth note up from F". If you are focusing on the "fourth note up" - then you don't have to worry whether it is B, Bb, or B#.

Now in movable Do, the solfege names are synonymous with degrees of major and minor scales. In commonly known types of music, degrees also have functions. So in movable Do, So = V = Dominant = wants to to move to Tonic. I lived and breathed this for 40 years. You internalize function and degree, and it helps you navigate in written music on an almost subconscious level. I was a strong sight reader for singing, and this transferred to instrumental playing. You perceive the written music on several levels. I think that this "Tonality" is going after the same thing.

A few years ago I learned to recognize notes as distinct pitches. I tended to perceive G as I of G major, or V of C major, and I was not really aware of that pitch in and of itself. I got some specialized training which gave me something akin to what people with "perfect pitch" have. I could hear G as G, or imagine G as G, in isolation. At the same time I was learning theory rudiments, and we got into blues, whole tone, octatonic, pentatonic scales.

As soon as you get to something like pentatonic or blues, your neat world of degrees falls apart. There is no 7th degree in pentatonic. Major scales have 8 notes in an octave: pentatonic has 5, blues has 7, yet these all have "Tonality". There is a tonal center, a "tonic". Whatever you have built in "degrees" falls apart, because the degrees we learned are specific to major and minor keys. There are immediate problems when writing out one of these scales of whether to name a note G# or Ab. The important factor is to be aware of PITCH. And at this point, having named something as G or A via a general "feel" of degrees doesn't cut it. You have to be aware of pitch, and pitch is a distinct sound. G# does not sound like G or A, but it sounds exactly like Ab.

I can understand Landorrano's explanation. You sing a song in F major and when you get to the 4th degree note you only care about it being 4 up = B or Si. Since your ear hears a major scale, it will know how to colour this 4th note up so that you sing Bb. This is an ear training along degrees, within the context of major and minor keys.

My problem with this is that you can also build an association, where the name of a note elicits a specific pitch in your ear - Bb or A# as distinct from B or A. Naming that pitch as B makes that ear-association fuzzy. Once your music is no longer strictly in the framework of a major scale - 4th note up from the Tonic - then you have to be able to switch to pure pitch. Bb is a different sound than B.

The thing is that as long as are staying with music that is limited in structure you're fine. But when it gets complex this sense of degrees can wreak havoc if the reference was too strong.

keystring, as you've moved out of common-practice music, have you extended your movable do to chromatic solfege names?

There have been quite a few changes and the adjustments are ongoing as I learn more. I started self-taught and the first thing I did was to learn note-names (ABC) to go with this awareness of degrees via Solfege. I had played piano when young, but for 30 years was playing mostly melody-instruments. My sense of chords was behind, but I did have a sense of function. I started the traditional harmony theory which has Roman Numerals, and is pretty well in line with what you get through movable Do (m.d.) solfege because you are still working with degrees. You get from IV what you used to get from "Fa" in the movable Do system.

At some point I started to learn chords per letter names, i.e. Dm/F instead of ii6. This has the same idea as recognizing the pitch Bb as Bb wherever it occurs regardless of key or function. You hear it as it is. A Dm chord can be ii of C major, vi of F major or anything. Being able to hear a chord purely as it is gives you a lot more flexibility. You can have a G7 chord which is not functioning as the dominant of C major or minor and your key may be something different.

At the end I found that the old associations were also useful. It seemed that the more ways you have of perceiving and naming music, the more sides to music you could address. I am still very much in the learning stage.

I think that for playing piano at some point you have to get a sense of chord, rather than only being able to sing the notes individually arpeggio-style, so that you can hear a major, minor, or diminished chord (or recognize it) and have it be one sound and unit on the keyboard. This is one part you can't do in singing unless you form a trio and have the person with the middle voice go up and down a semitone (which I have actually seen described somewhere).

J'ai posé la question. (I've asked the question.)

Un grand merci, P88. Une seule réponse - c'est un début. Let's see if any teachers answer over there.