Re: Tangled up in Lilypond syntax

[David Wright]

On Thu 28 Mar 2019 at 21:45:31 (+0100), Lukas-Fabian Moser wrote:
> 
> > I'm not trained in tonic solfa and don't find any advantage in singing
> > by using it. That said, I'm as likely to write "fah" over an entrance
> > that's difficult to pitch as writing "IV', but my "fah" relates to
> > the key that the music *feels* like it's in at the time. (I have a
> > good memory for pitch, but it's almost completely relative; I don't
> > have perfect pitch.)
> > 
> > So my question is, when you're singing along with typing a piece
> > that's in Aflat major, how do you cope with the fact that your "do"
> > is now "III" in the scale (IOW, you seem to be transposing the
> > whole time)?
> 
> It seems to me that your question is based on the assumption that the
> syllable "do" should have some inherent meaning of "tonic". But this
> is simply not the case in French practice (and, for that matter,
> Italien, Spanish, Russian etc.) - it's just the name of an (absolute)
> note. That the same, or rather, quite similar syllables are being used
> in other countries (and pedagogical contexts like tonic solfa) to have
> a _relative_ meaning is really unfortunate; their basic
> incompatibility leads to headaches all over the place when you want to
> accomodate mixed groups from both cultures. (This is something I have
> to cope with every day, teaching in a quite international environment
> at schools in Germany and Austria.)

You're right, that was my assumption. I was extrapolating from the
mention of "melodic movements" which I took to mean the way in which
tonic solfa (with a movable do) expresses intervals. I guess that
with a fixed do, the mental sound of those syllables is completely
different from mine.

It's interesting how people approach writing down LP's note names in
different ways. Thinking about it, my own method is to hear the size
of an interval, then imagine on which line or space that note will
land from the previous one, then type in the name of that note.
If someone asks me to sing notes by calling out their names, I tend
to imagine them written on the staff and then judge the intervals.

Cheers,
David.