Learning Music Without Notation In The 21st Century ‘An Eyesore Or An Apology’? (1)
The art of writing down music on paper by means of special symbols is called notation in music. There are two types of notations namely: Staff notation and tonic sol-fa notation.
Tonic sol-fa helps non-academic musicians to learn and sing a song they didn’t know before. The word Tonic refers to the first note of the scale, but in sol-fa it is doh or lah, which is the first letter of the sol-fa scale as mentioned earlier, while sol-fa is a system or type of notation for sight-singing, with some selected alphabets to match their imitated consonant sounds also.
Sight-singing
Sight-singing simply means singing a piece of written music at first sight without the aid of any other musical instrument. It’s a special skill that both singers and instrumentalist can develop, by training with one of several Sight-singing techniques. Two of the most widely used Sight-singing techniques are called “solfege” and “tonic sol-fa.” Here is a little background on each.
Solfege
For the medieval singer, life was rough. The only musical instrument available was the “monochord’ -a kind of single-string guitar, which was very difficult and time consuming. Music notation was unreliable at best, showing only whether a note was relatively high or low-and nothing else! The poor singer would attempt to learn his/her music by struggling through it on the monochord, and then because of the almost useless notation system, forget it by the next day or week. Then along came Guido. Guido D’arezzo In the early 1000’s, a monk named Guido, who lived in the Italian town of Arezzo, invented two musical tools that made life much easier for the rest of us: the musical staff, which made music notation much more accurate and reliable, and a sight-singing method called sofeggio, or (en francais) solfege. Like the method behind the song “Doh, a Deer,” Guido’s solfege used a well-known tune to help singers find their notes. Here’s how solfege worked. Guido began his tune on the note C... And then made each new phrase begin one note higher than the one before: C = beginning of first phrase D= beginning of second phrase E= beginning of third phrase F= beginning of fourth phrase G= beginning of fifth phrase
A= beginning of sixth phrase