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I've always maintained that I consider my lack of perfect pitch a reason to be grateful . The people I personally know who do have elaborate pitch recognition abilities, seem to consider them a nuisance more than anything else. I've heard of many things that are more challenging than you'd expect for those with perfect pitch, none of which are a problem for me. But then, I also once managed to learn an entire Eric Satie piece in the wrong key. I'd memorised it off the radio, but I couldn't remember what it was called or who had written it. So I didn't realise I was remembering it (and learning it) wrong, until I played it for my teacher.

Let's just say, my trust in my musical memory has been rather shaky since then. I'd really rather learn to religiously adhere to the score while practicing. But listening is *so* much easier than reading for me that it's not even funny. Once I've memorised a score, reading feels like torture, even though I *want* to do it.

What did your teacher say? "Wow that's great! What amazing musicianship to be able to do that! Would you like to also learn it in the key Satie wrote it in, or are you happy with it as is?" Or "Lots of work you've done, too bad you made a glaringly awful mistake and it's all in the wrong key. Let's get out the score and learn it the RIGHT way, because nobody could possibly enjoy what you're playing right now."

By your subsequent supreme doubt of your musical abilities, I have to wonder if there were elements of the latter in her response. Or is that an internal script you supply yourself, and could you imagine moving towards the former script?

The teacher I was with at that point considered me weird from the very beginning. She said she'd been able to play things by ear and from memory when she was younger, but "they had beaten that out of her" as she was going through conservatory. When I met her, she was completely unable to play anything other than short fragments without a score in front of her. But she was also the person everyone called when they needed an accompanist last minute, because *with* the score, she could play nearly anything on the spot.

I was mostly playing very simple things when I was with her: Mikrokosmos volume 2, little minuets from the likes of a five-year-old Mozart, a few random pieces that she reluctantly let me pick out for myself (or which I would just come to class with and tell her: here's something I've been working on), and my first Bach. The fact that I consistently came back playing these things from memory the week after she'd assigned them drove her nuts. She wasn't entirely wrong: I hadn't yet learned, back then, to memorise in a way that would allow me to pick up anywhere in the piece (or at least in more than a couple of utterly logical places) after something went wrong. It forced me to start over from the beginning every time, which ... got old fast, especially for her.

When I played the Satie in the wrong key, her response went along the lines of: "See! That's what you get for insisting on playing without a score."

With my current teacher, I am slowly learning to pick up anywhere in a piece, both with and without use of the score as a memory jogger. For a while now, I've been working on a Chopin Nocturne, the first page or so of which I learned before I'd seen the score. Much like the Satie, I had first heard it on the radio. I didn't know exactly what it was, and for a long time, I couldn't play it well enough for Shazam to recognise it. I also didn't dare go to my teacher with it, because I thought she was going to tell me I was crazy for even attempting that piece at this point. But she didn't.

I enjoy trying to play the various strands of music that are floating around in my head all the time. Sometimes they're things I've heard before, like Chopin and Satie. Occasionally, they constitute "new" music. But I still think it would be easier, and make me a better piano player, if I could just sit down with a score and play whatever's on there.

I agree with this. I too think of music as a language. However, I got in trouble in academic circles for saying that. Science has dominated musical academia for the past 50 years at the least.




No,it's not that. I gave up on teaching to sing a while ago . What I was concerned about is to give them a good reading foundation so that they could be prepared for any musical situation. However, I am now rethinking the whole solfege versus letter names... I think I will reorganize the lessons to teach them to sing after all because I am realizing how important it is to me. If I had kids I would want them to sing too, so now I have to be consequent .



Is it difficult to "convince" them or they actually come to you because of your approach?

Saranoya,
You remind me a bit of a new student of mine. He started about 2 months ago, ( he's only aroybd 10 years old) he had taken piano lessons for one year with a couple years break in between. I was teaching him 5 finger melodies in different positions and the other day he says: " I practiced something on my own" and plays me the first page of For Elise. He played it very well by the way. His dad plays it and he picked it up from him. What am I supposed to say? Of course I was thrilled. I encouraged him and told him to continue playing the piece but also to play the homeworks I give him. Going back to the 5 finger melodies felt very strange though but since he needs to improve hand coordination we'll have to stay on it a bit more.
If I were your teacher I would have applauded your Satie even in the wrong the key . A jazz pianist would tell you to transpose it in the 12 keys, lol
What happens with students who have good ears is that they don't have patience to read the scores . I don't know if that's your case but you will see if you take your time you can read most scores. Take small fragments and focus on hand gestures. That's my advice but I don't know you so it's hard to tell.

The beginners don't know enough to ask any of the right questions, nor do their parents usually if they are young. So I just tell them that this is how it's going to be, take it or leave it. I've had a few people who had some hesitation at the beginning because of lessons they had earlier in their lives with other teachers. If they can hear it, I point out to them that they don't know enough yet to form an opinion, and they'll have to trust me for a little while to see the results. I'm simply not interested in teaching any other method, so they can look for another teacher if they really don't want to do it my way.

Lack of patience to read scores? Oh yeah, definitely me!

I actually "ran into" a score I could more or less just sit down and play, the other day. It was new music, so I'm pretty sure I'd never heard it anywhere. I told my teacher and she said "yeah, well ... I never thought you really *couldn't* read. You just always pick pieces that are too hard for you to read."

Where by "read", of course, we don't mean just look at a score and get a general idea of what's there. We mean sit down at the piano and play it, while following the score.

You say take small fragments and focus on hand gestures. I'm pretty sure that's not going to teach me to read, because it's what I do now to learn my pieces that are "too hard" to read all at once. And the problem is, if I have to *practice* to be able to play something, then of course I'll have it memorised before I'm even done practicing!

I memorise the more "complicated" stuff by virtue of having to practice to get it right. The stuff that is simple enough for me not to have to practice, I'll have memorised by the end of the first try *because* it is so simple! Neither approach *really* teaches me to read.

Good morning. This is such an interesting topic, unfortunately I don't have time this morning to flesh out my thoughts on the matter but I do want to say that I have taken the opposite direction from you, BostonTeacher. I moved to Europe from the US as an adult. Learning solfège has been like a revelation for me, like finally realising what it means to read music. I encourage you to continue as best as you can to relate your teaching in Beantown to your European musical formation, it represents an incredible enrichment for the students who have you as the professeur, they are quite lucky, even if they don't realize it.

If solfege is so good and important, then how come voice majors have difficulty in college music theory classes?

Just a personal observation.

Well AZN, that's because most singers are never taught well by their teachers until they get into a serious college program. Most cannot read and cannot count time before then, and don't think it's terribly important anyway. Their poorly developed technical abilities are a whole other area of contention as well.

Thank you very much for your encouragement landorrano. The world is so small. Here we are , from all parts of the planet talking about solfege and what it means to us. I don't have much time either but I'l post this quickly.
Thinking about solfege brings back memories from my childhood. I was atypical as a kid because I loved solfege. Most children hated it.Perhaps because it was my father who first taught me I got to spend more time with him doing something special but I'm not sure it was that or that I loved singing. He was a pretty good teacher actually but he didn't teach me the intervals. He played the solfege lessons on the violin and I just followed the melodies by ear. Later though,I started solfege with a teacher and I went through the 5 years. We used Danhauser book and the lessons were a bit boring. I remember when I took the conservatory exams, I was a bit older when I started taking exams, that there were children crying. They were so scared singing in front of what we called the "tribunal" .. I felt bad for them. In any case, I'm told nowadays it has changed a lot. I think if I start teaching solfege it has to be a different method. I would be curious to know what method do you use?

Saranoya,
You remind me of myself when I was in my 6th year of piano. I heard a recording of Horowitz playing Rachmaninoff's prelude in g minor and I loved it so much that I got the score and tried to play it. I could read the notes but I could not play it.
Perhaps finding scores that are no too easy nor too difficult would be a good thing for you. Even if you are there mentally your body is telling you "nope" so you have to listen to your body and give it more time, do the steps in between.
It happens to me all the time. I need to be patient and don't give up if something doesn't happen right away. It will eventually happen if we don't give up. There is no other way around it.
I don't have good memory so I need to understand what's happening in the music in order to memorize it. Either this or saying the note names out loud, separate hands. This is what one of my teachers made me to do to memorize pieces and this is why after 10 years I can still sing them by heart. We always go back to the singing. It must be very powerful because they say people with alzheimer loose memory but they can still sing songs by heart.

The ability to sing what I saw lost its effectivess when the music became atonal, and when the music consisted primarily of constantly changing chords creating a kaleidoscope of harmony. Otoh, being able to relate a note on the page with a location on the instrument and also a feel in the hands, served me well every time. One of the pieces I work on is Debussy's Feuilles mortes. I can hear it in my head. The chords have a texture because of the combined sound of their notes. I would not be able to sing what I hear, because I cannot create multiple sounds with my voice.

The ability to sing what I saw also left me with a deficit in recognizing register. I could easily play an octave too high or too low and not notice it, because when you sing, you have to shift toward the range of your voice. You learn to discount register so that all C's are the same. But in fact, we must hear the difference and not just the sameness, or at least know how to reach in the right spot.

During my bachelors I took a class in atonal solfege and we did sing. Instead of note names we sung "nah-nah" The book is called Modus Novus. I even took a class in microtonal ear training later on. I wasn't very good at it but some classmates could sing microtones very well. In another class, in order to recognize harmony a teacher made us sing each individual note of the chord from bottom to top, left to right. First I thought it was a loss of time but after a while I started noticing how my aural skills started improving considerably. We didn't sing solfege, we sang scale degree numbers. Somehow if you can sing it, you can hear it and the sounds in your mind become more lively. I don't think it is a requirement but I've noticed how singing makes the process of reading, listening, and playing less cerebral and more intuitive which is a good thing in my book.
I'm an ear trainer nerd though. I even have an app in my phone to practice if I'm stuck in traffic. It's called Ear Trainer.
Have a good day. It's Friday already !

Yes, that makes sense. So far I have kept my approach neutral when I advertise my lessons in order to reach as many students as possible but I'm starting to realize I don't have to worry about narrowing it down because in the end it all works out. Luckily for us, there is always people interested in learning to play piano.

Good evening Boston Teacher.



I should mention that I am not a music teacher. However, judging by your post, you've been living in the States for quite some time. It seems to me that the teaching of solfège has changed a great deal. In France in fact, at elementary levels they don't say solfège class anymore, they say "Formation musicale", music training, and it appears to me that it is the case in Spain, it Italy as well. There is a great choice of teaching materials, and there is a stream of new things coming out all of the time. I know only a small part of this material, but I am very impressed by the will of music educators to find ways pass their knowledge on to youngsters.

Dannhauser is still there, though. Personally, I love the Solfège des solfèges. I've used it a great deal myself, and I've used it with my kids as a complement to the material that they've been given in their "formation musicale" classes. There can be no doubt, though, that Dannhauser is "old school".

One series that I like a great deal is by Ireneu Segarra, called "Llenguatge Musical", Musical Language. It is written in Catalan and uses a lot of Catalan and Spanish folksongs, but I am sure that you would find it very interesting to see the way he develops things starting from the most elementary level.

I know this method very well because I used it ! (I'm Catalan of origin) This method is a mixture of Kodaly , Dalcroze, and Orff adapted to the Catalan folk song repertoire.

I have been looking at the Yamaha Piano School . Their teaching integrates singing and solfege.

Rather than solfege, perhaps Kodaly is the best.

Boston,

Can you get copies of that method here in the US? I'd very much like to read it.

I was brought up on the solfege system, starting in first grade.
I started piano lessons 2 years later, and of course, learned the note letters. To this DAY, I still think in movable do - if I hear a tune and need to jot it down real fast, it's
m m m d, r r r t (apologies to Ludwig).

In a choral group, my music is noted with the solfege system on tough passages. If my choir is learning something, I am liable to explain it in solfege terms.

I'd be lost without it the movable do - fixed would slay me.

As a teacher, I think you'd be wise to stick to letter names, and for the sharper student, explain the solfege system too after a year or two.

Doncs benviguts al forum, amic meu !!! Veus, la multiplicitat des cultures i llengues es un riquesa a mai desvalorar!

In fact, when you wrote about kids crying during exams, I suspected that there might be something Iberic in your origins ... although I am not so sure that it wasn't similar in France or other countries in those days.

Just to be clear, and in response to a comment in Riley80's post, I am not suggesting that you should make your students do solfège. But I do believe very firmly that the european solfègic formation is a very important musical capital, to be cultivated and passed along as best as one can. This way of bringing everything back to the voice and of considering reading music as a subject in itself is very important, very rich. As I said earlier, it is a great chance for the kids who happen into your studio. Of course you will use this capital in your teaching in Boston in the way that you judge best.

In any case I felicitate you for posing this problem for yourself.

Que vagi bé!