How to Make the Transition from Singing Solfa to Reading Music
A colleague mentioned to me recently that in their experience, students who come from the Kodaly method tend to have absolutely no idea about reading musical notation. They found this concerning almost to the point of totally disregarding the value of Kodaly training. The Kodaly method is such a powerful way to teach music to children that I was completely surprised by this point of view.
I pointed out that the Kodaly method itself - the actual work of Zoltan Kodaly - was based on singing in a classroom. The focus of Kodaly’s work was to reform the musical experience in Hungarian schools. This echoed the work of the British music teachers Sarah Glover and John Curwen who were teaching music to groups of children in school and church settings. They were teaching them to sing and because of this, Solfa was enough, hands signs were enough and things like Sarah Glover’s “modulator” were enough. Children developed fine musicianship skills without needing to read musical notation.
However, the fact that Kodaly principles were originally applied to classroom settings does not mean that a “Solfa” and “Singing” approach to instrumental pedagogy isn’t just as effective or important. As teachers we simply need to understand how to make the transition from singing Solfa to reading notation. We need to understand how aural training based in Solfa skills provides a necessary foundation for all other musical training.
As a piano teacher, it’s easy to approach our lessons as though we are training young spies how to decode something secret: “here are some black and white keys, here is some notated music - let’s learn how one represents the other”
This however, is not music.
Notated music is a representation of music, but it is not music
Music is sound. It’s vibration and resonance. Music acts as a type of language, a reflection of emotion and life, it is an imitation of the world and our experience in it.
Musical notation, on the other hand, is really just a rather crude way of preserving music so that we can recreate it - or at least the idea of it - again in the future. But just as we cannot enter the same river twice, we cannot play the same music twice. If several musicians play from the same notated passage it will sound a bit different each time, because music is something other than the decoding of a printed score.
When we share music with children - not lines and spaces, clefs, note values or Italian words - but when we share MUSIC, wonderful and extraordinary things begin to happen. Sometimes it feels like we are helping to awaken a very old and very sleepy intelligence that has been lying in wait. Sharing music with children is what prepares them to eventually read musical notation.
What does it mean to share music with children? Simply, we just need to make music around them and with them. We need to sing with them. We need to move together and share as much acoustic music together as possible. This is where the Kodaly method and singing becomes so powerful, it helps lay this foundation and then they can begin reading notation.
Introducing Reading
When we teach musical sound first, notation easily follows. It really is that simple. If I want to introduce some type of musical notation I introduce the sound first, I let them experiment making the sound and then I say, “this is the symbol we use to represent that sound”.
This approach works for musical symbols but it also works for reading the stave. In PianoForte Level Two students make this transition - from singing to reading. It happens with ease - almost like the music teaches itself.
First, The concept of Treble G is introduced. It’s the G note that easy to sing because it’s not too high and not too low.
Image PianoForte Level Two, Copyright Starr Meneely 2022
Treble G is represented by the Treble Clef (which sort of looks like a really old fashioned letter G) and the line that goes through its centre represents the Treble G that is easy for us to sing. Different musical notes are notated above or below by lines and the spaces in-between the lines.
Sometimes, a bit of time needs to be spent helping children physically see the lines and spaces and how they ascend or descend. This has nothing to do with musical understanding and can be remedied with simple games, exercises, practice and time.
Image PianoForte Level Two, Copyright Starr Meneely 2022
Meanwhile, the rest of Level Two presents music in two different versions; once in Solfa and once on the Stave.
Image PianoForte Level Two, Copyright Starr Meneely 2022
Image PianoForte Level Two, Copyright Starr Meneely 2022
Step One - Always sing the Solfa and rhythm first away from the piano.
Step Two - Play the Solfa version on the piano in all its positions.
Step three - Turn the page and play the notated version.
At Step Three sometimes a little explaining needs to happen to help remind students how the lines and spaces represent notes going up and notes going down. If students understand Solfa, this rarely needs more than a bit of explanation.
We might have a conversation like this:
“When we sing Mi - So, what are we skipping?”
“Fa”
“How do we skip Fa on the stave? We do that by skipping over a line, or skipping over a space depending on where Fa is”.
Children understand this immediately because they understand that in order to go from Mi to So we must skip over Fa. This process becomes second nature and children learn to read music in tonal centres, hearing the distances between the notes instead of counting intervals.
This paves the way for all the great literature in the piano repertoire and allows students to learn things like harmony, theory and scales with great ease. It’s true perhaps that the Kodaly method might not always cover notational reading in its classroom setting, but we can’t ignore the power of this type of introduction to music and how it allows children to easily and effortlessly understand reading music.
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