Solfège and how it saved me

In my undergrad I was fortunate to have a musicianship teacher who was FANTASTIC. From him, I learned tons of incredible things that have always been of tremendous use. Especially with music that falls outside that easy to hear world of tonality. One of the skill is, as the post gave away, is solfège, for those of you that don't know you can read about it here. In short it is the assigning of syllables to degrees of the scale. There are two forms we used and had to master, movable do and fixed do. Movable do was reserved for tonal music where as the key changes so does the location of do. Fixed do was used in Atonal music at times. I should explain this a bit.

In the simple form fixed do is a method of solfège in which middle C is do and as tonality shifts you alter where the tonality falls. So C major would be do  then as we modulate towards G major suddenly your scale is based off so which is now functioning as do. In Atonal music we would use this form, it made you truly internalize what the intervals were and how they sounded. That being said if we hit a moment that was based on a diatonic scale we would insert or modulate to movable do to match that. This was something we exercised with our teacher, which was great because it taught you to find harmonic stability. As time has gone on it has given me the ability to quickly recognize these things, since there are times where you will totally miss it.

Lately I will work in fixed do when I encounter these moments but that is for a personal ear training reason. I have a feeling after a few months I will be back to my old ways of using movable do and fixed do together. This is because I really enjoy the way it allows you to dissect the music beyond a purely technical "checklist" fashion of analysis and into a larger scale understanding of the work.

So that is the preamble if you are still with me here I am going to talk about how I use these tools. One thing I have been asked, or commented towards is. How do you get this stuff in your head and the extension of how to sight read music that lacks obvious harmonic structure (talking in the sense of diatonic or chromatic music... for purposes of this post the word chromatic does not apply to something like Salome which is at the edge of chromaticsicm.).

Here are my secrets, they are not that ground breaking, they are tools I learned from my musicianship professor that I have kept up and built on.

NUMBER 1: Solfège... be good at it, if you can sight sing it... you can sight read it (On this, practise using middle C as do for fixed do. I am talking to horn players and such here. Don't think of the horn middle C as do in fixed do since the horns C is an F which is a fa. We are working on our ear, not horn.)


NUMBER 2: This is an extension of number one. The book Modus Novus.
This book is remarkable, it will help train your ear to hear elements of Atonal music. It gets them in your ear. Again I work out of this book in fixed do most the time. I will sing exercises, then buzz them, and finally play them on the horn. We are trying to make slightly obscure intervals second nature so when you encounter similar things in the wild you have them in your bones.

NUMBER 3: Practise sight reading Atonal melodies. Find things with rhythms that are not super complex, dissect the music into manageable chunks first, find intervals, think in solfège. Then either sing it or play it. The benefit of working in fixed do as a horn player is that nothing changes onto the horn, I just recreate the exact same pitch content, and the solfège syllables are still relevant. (Though one could argue this is the case with movable do also. The argument I would make based on personal experience is that each scale has a certain "colour"  or "taste" and you are changing that around when you start transposing.

That is all for this week. In the coming weeks I have some Q & As planned with some cool people, and some more topics.

Slap that +1, or drop a comment letting me know you were here.

New Notation, similar problems

As I have been working on Nebadon I have been able to make some ground conceptually over the last week which has been nice. I should note I have yet to play a single note, I have also not listened to the recording anymore (that time has come and gone for a few months). That being said I do spend quite a lot of time listening to the electronic tracks of whatever electronic works I work on. It is similar to recording/score study with any other music. The challenge behind this is as always, how does one notate sound? Stockhausen did not attempt to, there are some cues to vocal elements, but the main guide post I have is a time scale, as well as the noted time duration of various sections. A requirement for the performer in Nebadon is the precise alignment with the beginning of electronic tracks, which is easier said than done.

Past electronic works I have done that used time scale only alignment (so not graphic notation of electronic tracks) you end up in a kind of balancing act between the perception of musical time (tempo/rhythm) and the actual elapse of time (seconds). This is a dizzying experience at best, especially when the music falls outside of logical divisions of the second. One thing I have found that really helps me here is knowledge of the complete score (including electronics) and to have smaller alignment points between larger points. When trying to find these smaller points I tend to search for unison pitches, similar rhythms, or recognizable tonal material such as thirds, fourths, fifths, etc, that exist between the horn and the electronic part. One you decide on these elements you can notate an exact time point that helps in the architecture of that set of time points. In Nebadon right now, as I have not put horn to face I am only trying to navigate my way through the sounds for artistic ideas. For example, do I want to contrast or match (within the confines of Stochkausen’s instructions), as I learn the work these points will become more and more obvious, though history has taught me the mindful the work I do now, the easier it will when trying to coordinate later.

The next challenge I am going to be trying to wrap my brain around is of Stockhausen’s tempos, for those of you that are not aware Stockhausen discovered that tempos are related in ways similar to that of the chromatic scale. This is something that was met with conflict and still is. That being said, it is something unique to Stockhausen’s music so as a performer we have to observe it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Stockhausen_Gruppen_f%C3%BCr_drei_Orchester_series.png

Here you can see the tempo scheme for Gruppen. Cosmic Pulses (the electronic material for Nebadon is drawn from here) is based on 24 tempos, from 240bpm to 1.17bpm. So in short I will be dealing with tempos I am not used to. Luckily, I have a metronome that will do decimal places.

Until next time.

“I no longer limit myself” – Karlheinz Stockhausen