Vocal notation

[MrGongGong]

Perhaps the suggestion that singers cannot stay in time is more the fault of publishers than the musicians themselves.

If you threw a singer and a viola player off a cliff which would hit the ground first ?
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The Viola player, the singer would have to stop to ask for directions !

[Keraulophone]

I know many Welsh choirs used to use tonic sol-fa.

While on holiday in the Welsh village of Abergorlech during my early teens, I was pressed into accompanying the hymns in Chapel. As the large hymn book creaked open, I was dismayed to see nothing but tonic sol-fa before me. That vision haunted me for years later, as I was clueless about the notation and felt I had let the Minister down. We ended up singing the few hymns which I could then play by ear, and the voices easily drowned out the organ.

[beakon]

Tonic sol-fa and solfege aren't the same thing as far as I'm aware - tonic sol-fa, as its name sort of suggests is a system where doh is always the tonic, whereas solfege works on a fixed system where doh is always C (and C# and Cb) re is D etc. The point of the endless sightsinging using this that mercia describes is two-fold - first to develop a sense of relative pitch (associating each name with a more or less fixed pitch whatever key one is in) and secondly, as mercia says, to facilitate score-reading as each clef relates to a different transposition. For example, if you read the alto clef as if it were the treble clef, you know what notes instruments in D are playing. It does mean learning some very obscure and (nowadays) redundant clefs such as the mezzo-soprano and baritone though ... I taught solfege for a while at the same music college as mercia by the sound of it .... although I am not the French gentleman!

[mercia]

oh, thanks for explaining that beakon. It is a long time ago but I remember doh always being C, whatever key we were in, which I think struck me as odd at the time. Anyway they were fun classes, I don't think I'm any better at reading alto/tenor clefs and transposing instruments than I was then, I'm amazed that anyone can play a piano reduction from a full score, sightread!

[MrGongGong]

Interesting stuff beakon
I seem to remember being taught sight singing with a movable doh (what we would now term Homerstyle !) then moving on to atonal sight singing which was part of my degree course and massively useful, though i'm more than a little rusty these days.

I do think its useful to learn early on that many things are moveable rather than fixed
when I studied Sitar the idea that SA was the starting note and would move depending on the instrument (as long as you weren't playing with a harmonium !) or voice is a useful and more human scale idea. The same is true of pitch , how many more silly arguments do I have to have with (usually !) teenage saxophonists about why transposing instruments are the way they are and that Cb and B are different
notes even though they might use the same key on the piano !