Tonic Sol-fa (Solfege) Notation PDF

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Summary

 Tonic Sol-fa (Solfege) Notation Akapo Emmanuel ([email protected]) Solfege (or Solmization) is a way of singing scale tones with syllables. The most familiar example of solfege is the song from "The Sound of Music:"Doe (Do), a deer, a female deer; Ray (Re), a drop of golden sun, etc. ...

Description

 Tonic Sol-fa (Solfege) Notation Akapo Emmanuel ([email protected]) Solfege (or Solmization) is a way of singing scale tones with syllables. The most familiar example of solfege is the song from "The Sound of Music:"Doe (Do), a deer, a female deer; Ray (Re), a drop of golden sun, etc. The goals are to train you in sight reading and sight singing, to give you more precise pitch, to improve recognition of musical, and to strengthen your understanding of music theory. The Major scale (on key Cmajor)

The minor scale (on key Aminor) The natural minor scale is the same Do, Re, Mi pattern, but it begins on La instead of Do:

Chromatic Tones in Solfege What about the "in-between" notes? There are various traditions of altering the standard syllables to name the notes that fall between Do and Re, etc. Raised tones: The sharped Do becomes Di, the sharped Re is Ri, Fa becomes Fi, Sol rises to Si, La to Li.

Lowered tones: The flatted Re is Ra, flatted Mi is Me, flatted Sol is Se, La becomes Le, Ti becomes Te.

In the key of C therefore, C would be Do, C# Di, Db would be Ra and D natural would be Re, and so on. You would use the sharpen tones when singing the ascending melodic minor, like this:

Piano illustration

Beginning to Write in Solfege A syllable is used for each note of the score.The syllables doh, ray, me, fah, soh, lah and ti are written d, r, m, f, s, l and t and refer to the seven different notes of a major scale. A superscript 1 (or 2) next to the letter indicates one or two octaves up. A subscript indcates a lower octave. The key is always stated if it is important, otherwise the pitches are purely relative.

Adding Note Values Sol-fa does not generally indicate time signatures and does not differentiate between different beat values. 2/2, 2/4 and 2/8 will all be written the same. A barline will precede the first beat of the bar and a colon will precede beat two. A note longer than one beat is indicated by a dash -. A fullstop precedes the half beat and a comma precedes a quarter beat. An inverted comma precedes a triplet division. (I've substituted a semi-colon.) Rests are simply rhythm marks without sol-fa names.

The third beat of a four beat bar is preceded by a short vertical line.

Compound time is written as if each smaller division is one beat. In 6/8 time quaver two and three, five and six are preceded by a colon, and quaver four is preceded by a short barline. As a result, the semiquaver divisions are preceded by full stops because they are now halfway through the beat. A short barline also precedes beat 7 in 9/8 (and 7 and 10 in12/8) time. A duplet division is preceded by a colon.

Now practice singing the songs below: Key of D {|m :m |f :s |s :f |m :r |d :d |r :m |m :- .r |r :- | {|m :m |f :s |s :f |m :r |d :d |r :m |r :- .d |d :- | Key of C

{|s :- |- :- |- .m1 :- |s :d1 |m1 .se :- |- :- |- :- |- :- | {|l :- |- :- |l .le :t .m1 |s .fe :f .r1 |d1 .m :- |- :- |- :- |- :- |

Akapo Emmanuel ([email protected])...