Now I’m going to change my focus. Since the thread title has “Fixed/Movable Do” in it, I’m going to feel free to share more about why I have chosen “Movable Do”. Let me preface this by saying that fixed do works fine too, and that if you know little about music and are doing LMS and/or SoftMozart, with Fixed Do built in to the software, I’m not trying to talk you out of just using that.
Having said that, I’m doing LMS with my children, and will soon need to put in a lot of work to adapt it for Movable Do. It would have been much easier for me to just use Fixed Do. I shudder when I think that I almost didn’t buy LMS, thinking it would be incompatible with my desired approach. That would have been a costly mistake, as my children are thriving with it. Frankly, I’m now looking into SoftMozart again too, now that I know I could use letter-names and skip the fixed-do aspect of it. We’ll see if we can afford it early next year when we are out of debt. Anyway, it would have been much easier for me to just go with Fixed Do, so I did some “soul searching” and read everything I could on the topic. If you want a more exhaustive look at my reasoning, I refer you again to the post I did on the subject. http://www.teaching-children-music.com/2012/10/movable-do-vs-fixed-do.html. At the bottom, I referenced a few other articles I loved for further reading.
Allow me to summarize my perspective here.
For me, it’s not about whether I teach my children with Movable Do or Fixed Do as much as that we have a solid system for teaching absolute pitch and relative pitch. Have a quick look at this article, with his pictures: http://www.perfectpitch.com/perfectrelative.htm#Both. I’m not endorsing his product per-say, I haven’t used it, but I love this analogy. Perfect pitch (or at least a solid understanding of absolute pitch) is similar to seeing in color, and relative pitch is similar to seeing clearly. You need both to get the whole picture. His article doesn’t touch on solfege at all, which is valuable for my argument.
We may take for granted the acquisition of relative pitch, since this seems to be the skill more musicians develop, as well as the general populace, but it’s not a skill that a fairy godmother comes and bestows upon the musically inclined. It has to be learned, and especially in an early-learning environment where they have no past experience to draw from, I want to make sure that I teach it. I’ll illustrate this by sharing the story of a little girl (I can’t find the link) who had perfect pitch but not relative pitch. Look at these two examples,
“C,C,G,G,AA,AA,G, F,F,E,E,D,D,C”.
“D,D,A,A,B,B,A, G,G,F#,F#,E,E,D”.
Do they look similar to you? If you play them both on an piano, the first one is “Baa Baa Black Sheep”, and the second is the “ABC song”. This young girl was told that “Baa Baa” and “ABC” both had the same melody, isn’t that neat? She had learned one in the key of “C”, and the other in the key of “D”, and she adamantly contended that they were nothing alike. This girl had perfect pitch, but she had a poor understanding of relative pitch. Luckily for this 2-year-old, she had plenty of time to develop the skill. I only wish to point out that developing relative pitch isn’t a given, especially for an early learner.
Without digging too deep into music philosophy, theory, and pedagogy, I assert that it is vitally important for the musically literate child to develop both absolute and relative pitch. The question should not be “which one is more important?”, but rather, “How can I most effectively teach both?”
How then, do we teach each of these skills?
For Absolute pitch, the most common methods are:
- Letter names, such as C,E,G
- Fixed Do (C is always Do)
- Music notation on the staff (there are many musicians who read music and play, that don’t understand the “ABC” or “Do Re Mi”)
Little Musician uses all three, as does Soft Mozart.
For Relative pitch, the most common methods are:
- Movable Do
- Numbering systems for the scale degrees
- Complex theory references that describe function, such as “Tonic”, “Supertonic”, “Leading Tone”, and “Dominant”
- Musical analysis of the scale, such as “whole step, whole step, half step, whole step, whole step, whole step, half step”
- Listening exercises
- All too often, leaving this skill acquisition to chance, which often works for a singer, but rarely works for the instrumentalist.
Take a look at these lists, add too them as you will, it’s not exhaustive, and make sure that you have a good system in place for teaching both relative and absolute pitch. That’s the ultimate goal, the final destination if you will. Do you have a map?
My map looks like this (again, not exhaustive):
To teach absolute pitch, I am using “ABC”, and, obviously, music notation on the staff. These systems are precise, effective, and well integrated into my culture.
To teach relative pitch, I am using “Movable Do” and listening exercises for my beginning students, although I do have a plan for incorporating the others into their education later (all except leaving it up to chance!). Numbering systems work up to a point, but sight-singing numbers becomes very tricky when accidentals come into play, just as sight-singing with letter names becomes tricky for the same reason.
Sight-singing is easiest for the vocalist when solfege is used, whether you are in fixed or movable do. Enunciating “one, two, three, four, five, six, and sev” (seven is usually shortened for sight-singing purposes) is more difficult than “Do, Re, Mi, Fa, So, La, Ti”, and likewise, "A, B, C, D, E, F, G can also be tiring for the voice since they all rhyme with “ee” (not the most comfortable vowel), except for “F”, which ends in an unvoiced consonant. Solfege ends with a vowel, and the singer gets to sing different vowels, which is much easier for the voice. For this reason, I applaud the use of solfege, whether with fixed or movable do.
The instrumentalist can be precise on their instrument without having to stumble through awkward syllables. They see a “B-flat” on the staff, they play it, and can quickly move on to “A” without the stumbling block of having to sing “flat”. Letter names work well for the instrumentalist for establishing absolute pitch.
The vocalist can be precise with solfege, using movable “Do”, no matter what key they are in. It is easier for them to transpose “Twinkle Twinkle” into different keys while keeping the same syllables, “Do, Do, So, So, La, La, So”.
The tricky thing about using fixed do for the vocalist is the need to decide what to do with accidentals.
With movable do, the most common syllables will be 'Do, Re, Mi, Fa, So, La, and Ti", with “Fi” for “Fa-sharp”, and “Si” for “So-sharp” trailing close behind. The interval between “Mi” and “Fa” is always be a minor second, and “Ti” smoothly resolves into “Do”.
For the fixed do crowd, you can either make every “C”, whether it be “C#”, “Cb”, “Cbb”, “C##”, or just “C” be “Do.” The singer doesn’t have to switch around with “Di” and “Me”, but now now has to intuit what the accidentals are. “Mi” and “Fa” are not always a half step apart.
To compensate for this shortcoming, the “fixed do” musician may alter the syllables, as LMS does. “Mi” is always “E”, and “Me” is always “Eb”, and so on. This works to a point, especially as you stick with the easier keys of “C”, “F”, and “G”, but ultimately you need to branch out, and this alteration can become incredibly tricky for the vocalist.
The movable “do” singer will sing the A major scale, and the Ab major scale as follows: “Do, Re, Mi, Fa, So, La, Ti, Do”. The fixed “do” with altered chromatics singer will sing those scales as “La, Ti, Di, Re, Mi, Fi, Si, La”, and “Le, Te, Do, Ra, Me, Fa, So, Le”, respectively. That’s tricky. Likewise, playing those scales on the piano works well when you think in terms of “whole-step, whole step, half-step” etc, but it is very tricky for the sight-singer to analyze that process while simultaneously assigning the syllables “Le, Te, Do”. It’s much easier to teach and use “Do, Re, Mi”, having already established and internalized the intervallic relationship between each of these scale degrees. For the sight-singing user of Movable Do, “Do” to “Fa” is an effective short-cut for internalizing how a pitch relates harmonically to the music. In other words, “Do” is easier to sing than “Tonic”, and “So” is faster than “Dominant”. “Do-Mi-So” will always be a “I chord”, and “Fa-La-Do” will always be a “IV” chord.
Of course movable “Do” isn’t the cure all for music analysis, I’m not saying that it is. However, my reasons for using it are solid, and are not just based on my geography. I want “Movable Do” enough to put in a lot of work to adapt LMS semester 2 to help my children develop this skill, so it’s obviously not the path of least resistance for me. Life has been crazy lately, but I will soon be making those files to help me reach this goal and sharing them here on the forum, so if I’ve convinced anyone else to go this route, I’m here to help, and I’d love to have a little support group to work on this goal together, so let me know! If someone needs help with that now, it might motivate me to get those helping files done sooner, but right now I feel no rush since we’re only on lesson 50 of LMS.
