Author Archives: georgeofmc

For as long as I can remember I have been able to sight-sing with confidence, doubtless due to my early training as a chorister and subsequent involvement with choirs for many years since. It still remains, for me, the most important thing for any musician – to be able to sing.

Three years ago I signed up for a British Kodàly Academy Spring Course. I can’t quite remember why, but one of the things which did interest me was the knowledge that the Kodàly approach uses solfège, the naming of each note of the scale as do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti, do. I was interested to see whether there was anything in it, since I had my doubts – after all, I could sight-sing perfectly adequately without, so what possible use could giving all the notes funny names be to me? As I soon discovered, I was missing the point.

The first event of Day One was choir. We learned a song from memory by repeating back phrases sung by our director, which was challenging for one reason only – we were expected to sing in solfa! For me pitching the notes was easy, but remembering which solfa name to sing them to was not, and immediately I found my brain racing to keep up. And it was relentless! Just as I thought I had the hang of it, we cut to something different – learning another melody, or clapping and/or stamping a complex syncopated rhythm. And then (I should have seen it coming!) we put all of them together; melody, rhythm, others singing the countermelody, and the solfa! By the time the hour was up I felt like I’d done a day’s mental workout. They say that music uses both sides of the brain – definitely!

And then on to musicianship training. I was aware that there are different hand signs for each of the solfa syllables, but was not yet aware of their full potential. We learned some relatively simple pentatonic melodies from memory, and again the most difficult element was singing the solfa names. By now I realised that I was becoming much more actively aware of the relative position of each note in the scale, rather than just pitching each note from the previous one. The latter system still worked for the pitch, of course, just not for the name. Interesting. And then we were asked to perform a melody in canon. First at the piano; play first, and start singing a bar later (in solfa). Challenging, but manageable, and I have to say I felt very proud of myself for negotiating the task successfully, albeit with my brain running at full tilt. And then with hand signs. That’s right, sing first (in solfa) and then sign the canon a bar later with the solfa hand signs. “You’ve got to be joking” I said to Klara, the delightful Hungarian lady who was taking our class. Evidently she wasn’t. As encouragement, she performed the canon in three parts, using both hands, without even breaking a sweat! Respect.

Back in choir, I soon discovered that when the music changes key, do moves too – and so of course does everything else! Never before have I been so intensely aware of the place value of each note in a melody, and in observing every modulation as it occurs. I realised that much of the time I sight-sing on autopilot; yes, I am constantly listening, but perhaps not always thinking so hard. On the other hand, solfa actively forces you to listen and to analyse, and the intensity of this experience is actually very surprising. It is an amazingly powerful tool for teaching complete novices (as my Choir who can’t sing will testify) right through to analysing Schubert symphonies in detail, which I did on this year’s Spring Course.

This approach to musicianship is so refreshingly rigorous, and I love it!

The third of my five ‘E’s for outstanding instrumental teaching is developing an Enquiring mind. I think that it is vital that the teacher gets into the habit of asking questions rather than answering them, so that the student quickly learns that he is expected to work things out for himself. A simple example: “don’t forget the E flat in bar 5” becomes “which note did you play wrong in bar 5?” It is so easy to fall into the trap of giving the answers, but telling is not teaching and we should not be in so much of a hurry to teach a piece of music that we forget to teach the student.

Assuming the student answered the question correctly, let’s make the next question a little more difficult: “Can you sing me the E flat please?” At this point, in 9 out of 10 cases, the student will reach for an E flat on the piano – if they get the chance that is, because I’m ready for them! “No, don’t play it, sing it.” For me, this really gets to the crux of the problem. Sitting at a piano is like having a calculator in an arithmetic exam, but easier; if you want to know an answer, just press the relevant key and the answer is immediate.

At the simplest level, this is going to test the student’s aural memory. Can they remember, in their inner ear, any of the notes which they have been playing in the last few moments? The questions which they need to ask themselves are going to be the equivalent of a mathematician showing how they reached the answer – if they think that you are just expecting them to pull an E flat out of the air then of course they have every reason to panic!

A few more leading questions might help; “The phrase started on a B flat, can you remember what that sounded like? Yes? Well, can you sing me a B flat then?” Once they have sung the B flat, a little theory might be required: “How far away is E flat from B flat? Ok, sing up a four note scale from the B flat and we should get there!”

My piano pupils are used to this type of questioning, resigned to it perhaps! They realise that I am serious, however, and although in the early days some will just dig their heels in and refuse to sing – I had a pupil once who took weeks and weeks even to pluck up the courage to proffer a single squeak – they all know that it is an expectation. The benefit, of course, is that they are using their ears, and they soon realise that it can be quite helpful to have their ears connected up with what their fingers are doing.

This style of teaching encourages the student to use their brain, their memory, their ears, their knowledge of theory, their voice …. and sometimes diversionary tactics! The alternative “don’t forget the E flat in bar 5” seems unhelpful in comparison.

I was fortunate enough to gain a place as a chorister in a parish church at the age of eight, and received five years of the most wonderful musical training. In fact, there was a series of very specific tests which we were expected to work through, and success was rewarded with a coloured drawing pin on a chart. Wow! (Actually, I was hooked from day one!)

More specifically, there were 7 blue, 15 red, 5 green and 5 purple tests. The blue ones were along the lines of ‘read a hymn’ (Immortal, invisible, God only wise,
In light inaccessible hid from our eyes!), sing a scale G to G etc – all things which a seven/eight year old needed to get to grips with if he was going to progress to becoming a ‘full chorister.’ It was a very simple system, but the tests became increasingly demanding – I can’t remember what any of the purple ones were, but they were probably along the lines of ‘process down the nave of the church with a candle in one hand, whilst sight-reading the alto line of Stanford in G with the music upside down!’

However, I do remember several red ones, including ‘sight-read no jumps’. Our assistant choirmaster, Mr Baker, would draw a stave, a treble clef, and a major scale from middle C to top G, on the back of a scrap of paper. All that was required was to be able to sing up and down the scale, by step, as he pointed to each note, but changing direction occasionally. The aural equivalent of going up or down a ladder, one rung at a time. Looking back, we must have learned

• the ‘sound world’ of the major scale
• where the tones and semitones were
• that next door notes move either from line to space, or from space to line

Not too tricky once you got the hang of it, but nevertheless something which needed practise and familiarity. Sight-read jumps, on the other hand, was fiendish, and the test board, all neatly organised in rows and columns, had a notably empty column under this heading – the few boys with a red drawing pin at this point were held in great esteem, and quite rightly! In short, if you can do this, you can do anything, and I do mean that quite sincerely.

Sight read no jumps is not difficult, but I believe that it is necessary for all musicians to practise it and master it. I regularly encounter young musicians (and also older ones) who quite simply can’t sing from one note to the next. I find it difficult to allow them to justify why not – scales are the alphabet which we work with, and we must have a basic working knowledge of the scale. They might not like it, but when I ask my piano pupils to sing a musical line in lessons, they know that I’m serious and they just get on with it. After all, the ears need just as much training as the fingers.