Your emotional and intellectual response to -

[m1469]

Words like "intervals" and "solfege" ?

Please be as deep or shallow as you like.  If you are reminded of a class, or a particular other experience in your life, or if they have deep meaning -or no meaning- for you, please, I would be most grateful if you could kindly reveal all  .

[Derek]

solfege makes me think of solfegietto by CPE Bach, the first classical piece I ever loved...the first performance I ever heard of it was in this computer game.

[ted]

No musical responses at all I'm afraid, intellectual or emotional. I didn't know what the latter is anyway and had to look it up in the dictionary. I know what the former is but I do not feel any particular reaction to either the word or what it describes. Associations with certain intervals ? Again I'm afraid not; taken in isolation, one is as good as another.

If you mean one of those instant response, psychological associations, the first thing I thought of was an interval (intermission in America I think) at the pictures when we neighbourhood kids went to the Saturday matinee. We used to throw ice creams and lollies over the balcony onto the people in the stalls, and I used to stick two fingers up in front of the projector hole during the national anthem. God they were good times.

[pianowolfi]

Intervals and chords are most important to me, I often sat in the class getting goose bumps as the teacher played certain chords and intervals because I was diving deeply into the specific quality of each of them. I didn't ever have Solfège though, only normal ear training (or is that the same where you live? Because in our country only the French and Italian speaking parts have solfège in the literal sense)

[alessandro]

Interval

Emotional > The moments in time during a walk in a hilly country between two hills or even the moment that I would have to make a jump over for instance a babbling brook, a little bit like "valley"...

Intellectual > The period between two moments in time (only on second thought the distance between two tones)

Solfège

Emotional > Moldy material, old-style, and-one-and-two-and-three-and-four...

Intellectual > A nice way to learn reading notes - Going straight to for instance the piano and read directly from the score is for a beginner I think often a frustrating and time-consuming occupation.   With some good basis of Solfege, "reading" music becomes easier.   On a second thought, for "reading" music the same principle applies as in so many things ; the more you do it, the better you get at it.

[m1469]

Thanks for your responses!  I have so far 2.5 pages of thoughts and questions (in my hand-written music journal) and -even though there's been moments of great clarity- I currently feel stuck between ideas and questions, without words.

I am trying to work out the idea of music as a "language" and I guess I'm trying to bridge a gap between my childhood musician and my current musician.  Sometimes I'll get on a train of thinking that leads me somewhere that is difficult to get back to on demand, for some reason, or which I guess leads me to another question, taking me out of the "answer" I had before.   That's what happened, I reached a point of clarity and then a new question, which made it blurry again.  

Where I am 'at' right now is in questioning the idea of meaning behind musical texts and its particulars (like "key" or "intervals", for example).  And it seems like much of that can only have a meaning that is personal, even though it's very possible to progress in the words and in the surface sense of the language.  I mean, a person could have, it seems, a *fantastic* ear and recognize any interval instantly, have perfect pitch, they could know it all inside and out on that level, yet there could still be something missing musically - and, I *think* it's because the "language" is not in fact a language unto itself, in the sense that something like a perfect 4th only has a deeper meaning if we assign it one, and without that assignment, it's really pretty meaningless.  It seems like even though responses in this thread are varied, what I am saying is probably still true.

In the Spanish classes I took in University, we were not allowed to speak in English (or in anything except Spanish) and if we didn't know a word, we were encouraged to try to describe it in Spanish, or draw pictures, and I know this is a teaching style designed to get to a direct relationship with the language being learned, vs. the intellectual steps through a foreign language and comfort language, towards something which very likely already has meaning in our everyday environment (like "cat" or "gato").

So, if you treat music like an actual language, basically it would be most communicative if one were truly replacing/assigning the worlds of meaning in our lives, with musical texts and particulars, whereas it seems that this is generally not how music is intellectually "taught" through ear training and theory and such.  I understand that there are ways of assigning particles of tunes to intervals, in order to help in recognition, but there it seems there is an extra or even backwards step, where first languages were born out of there being things within our lives that had more or less consistent meaning within our lives.

I don't know, I'm kind of stuck.  If I ask myself what a(n) minor scale means to me, that is a tough question because it seems like part of a linguistic that I am working to understand ... when, if I were still a child, I think I would have incorporated it into my life in a more meaningful way and probably would have started assigning it personal meanings and using it more freely in improvisation and composition, built to represent what I wanted it to represent.  But, it's also very possible to learn the grammar, or learn new words and then to start to be able to use those in meaningful ways.

[m1469]

Aaa ... now I can't tear myself away from this thread!

See, part of this all came about by learning the violin and then quadruple that when I quickly re-learned by ear the Star Spangled Banner for my little student.  I went into a certain mode where I began storing pitches and pitch-combinations (which formed shapes to me) so that I could find the tune without picking like a chicken at the keys.  And, I suddenly realized/remembered that I did this all. the. time. as a child, and had a storage of these things within me.  So, you could say that if I learned the sound and sound-combination-shapes of one place on the piano while I was figuring the Star Spangled Banner out on the piano, and then I would go to the piano to figure something else out which had a same particle, my inner storage had that shape and could more or less "plug in" that shape for the new tune.  And, now I realize that not only CAN this be done with *everything* on the piano, but that is exactly WHAT we are doing.  But, it all seems so infinite to me that it's difficult to know how to assign it meaning.  So, I started thinking about solfege as it relates to the sound combinations that I found in the Star Spangled Banner, and realized that for me, to think in solfege would just be a certain, fairly meaningless way to merely describe something to me that, when I thought in terms of tune, had much greater meaning to me than solfege - and it having meaning is KEY to it being stored as useful information!  But, is that just because I didn't grow up thinking like that?  What about people who grew up with solfege as a part of their everyday relationship with music?

In any case, I feel like I am right on the brink of having much more access to something I'm pretty starving for.  But, I don't quite know how to get there.  I realized that things like "A" or alphabet names (by the time I was 12), or things like "interval" and all of that lingo has meant almost nothing to me, because my very first interactions with music (and for quite a number of years) and pitch and the piano were related to TUNES and shapes and "pathways" on the piano, and those alone, and those in relation to my childhood world.  It all had some kind of meaning to me that was personal - but, I don't rule out that solfege can mean just as much to others.  But, along those lines, I realized that I'm not stupid for struggling with being able to spit out interval names and such (OK, I can probably do it fairly well, at this point, but still) - I'm not stupid for feeling stupid in formal classes which had ZERO fundamental relation to the entire musical world I built for myself as a child.  I would like them to meet, though, and I feel it's important if they do.  

The key of f minor means something to me beyond just being a scale.  It means the Appassionata to me.  The key of C minor means Mozart's Fantasia and Sonata in C minor, and the opening octave C's of Chopin's first Ballade remind me of Mozart's Fantasia in C minor ... but, that is because I learned about C minor while I learned Mozart's Fantasia in C minor ... and, what if it were something else, first?  C minor doesn't inherently mean Mozart's Fantasia in C minor, it means that TO ME, because that was my first real association with it.

Also, this is all why there are times that I will hear a particular chord or note or interval, and I'll think immediately of a tune.  But, I feel like my eyes and ears and mind need something more ... it all needs more opening, I think, in order to grasp a bigger view.  

[m1469]

Here me is again  .

Here is a part to my childhood system that is probably flawed and something needing to be sorted out.  I used to relate EVERYTHING to middle C, and this is why fixed Do has fascinated me, because I *think* the way I used to think would most closely be related to that.  But, I need to think in terms of movable Do, too, I think.  I also realized that a big part of what would form the shapes on the piano, for me, would be the sense of polarity I would have to tonic in the piece I would be learning, though I didn't call it tonic.  So, I'm trying to put the lingo part of the language with how that little person in me used to think, and I'm going to grow her up a bit .  

*cuts through stone*

[m1469]

GAH!  This subject torments, torments, torments me!!  Everyday is a little bit more and it's just ... SO. ARGHY!!!  But, I'm trying to see that if it all came at me at once, I might not be able to handle that, so it's probably OK if it's just so gradually and subtle and gentle and sometimes intense.  


BUT, more pages and pages are pouring out of me.  Bach was a genius.  


So far, I feel like a scale is nearly meaningless as a linear set of notes.  This doesn't mean I don't want to know them this way, but that's not actually what a scale represents, exactly, rather it represents this polarity to tones found throughout a piece of music.  I know that there is more to all of that, once getting into 20th C. music and such, but I'm not there yet.  And, digging into this sense of meaning, I feel like there is nothing about actual music, even specifics like melody and harmony and these things, that MEAN "theory" ... as in, theory is not the MEANING of these things, but I do accept that theoretical ideas, such as "major" "minor" roman numerals, etc., are types of "classification" of sounds and such.  This is similar to grammar and spelling not being the meaning of a sentence and words.  

There's still just so much more to it.  

Ever since I started learning about theory in a formal way, I got a bit mixed up because I started thinking that I was supposed to be able to find the meaning of music and musical passages and such in describing it theoretically - but that's not how it works, that's backwards (and, duh, of course it's backwards!  Theory came AFTER).  It's more like "this set of notes means this melody, means this music, etc.."  I thought I was supposed to be finding meaning where there's not the type of meaning I am wanting to find!  Just to be clear, though, that doesn't mean I want to avoid knowing these things, I just want it to be properly organized and have the appropriate ranking in my musical experiences.

Still working my little thoughts.  But, key-combinations are starting to mean something resonating to me now, and I see that somebody like Beethoven, who has clearly observable patterns, is tying these things together.  And, I just pulled out Bach's invention #1 for a student, and this is FULL of "Here's a pattern and this is what it sounds like when you use this key-combination.  And, this is what it looks like on the paper - so, when you're in C Major, these are examples of key combinations/sounds you are going to encounter, and here, let me show you how we can modulate to G Major."


*fights with self to practice libretti for the remaining 45 mins. of practice time*