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Written by Sean Dargie
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Tuesday, 05 September 2006 |
So I promised to delve into some ways to practice applying theory and solfege to your personal and ensemble practice, and that’s how I’ll present them. First, I feel that it’s important to share the philosophy that helped me to choose these exercises. In my experience, the more that an exercise demands your full concentration, the better it is. Repeating a simple pattern through various keys helps to warm up your voice, but don’t make the mistake of thinking that it helps your ear training. You perform what you practice and if your mind is elsewhere while regurgitating “do-re-mi-fa-sol-fa-mi-re-do-sol-do” then when you want to actively find sol in relation to mi then tough luck. I still sometimes have difficulty with basic multiplication because when I was in elementary school all we did was add numbers with the implication that they were multiplied sums. So you can bet that for at least five minutes every day I was thinking about video games while mindlessly repeating “5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30…”. So we’re going to avoid that here.
Stuff for you
(Exercise 1) This one is simple; SOLFEGE EVERYTHING. Seriously. That’s it. Talking about solfege won’t get you any farther in a song than talking about punching will in a fight. You need to practice it on the fly in order to perform it on the fly. When you’re sitting on the subway and you hear the tones before an announcement, figure out the interval. Take a small section of one of your favorite songs and figure it out. Take stuff that you have already memorized and figure out what those notes are. “ Happy Birthday” and the “Star Spangled Banner” are mind-benders if you’ve never tried it before. The point is to retrain your ears to this new language in the same that total immersion helps speed up the learning of Spanish or French, for example.
(Exercise 2) Ok, listening to everything could cause a headache, so here’s a way to help focus your ears on something smaller. Pick a single interval or scale degree and listen exclusively for that. See how many perfect fifths there are in your favorite guitar solo. Listen for the on the radio and on TV. This is a little easier to do than exercise 1 because you’re filtering out all the junk that isn’t te, but it’s sneaky in that you’re still really solfege-ing everything in order to determine what isn’t te!
(Exercise 3) If you need some extra time to get really comfortable with a scale degree or interval, I highly suggest singing against some kind of drone on the tonic of the key. If the fan in your room buzzes at a consistent tone, hold a note against it and focus intently on how the two react with each other. Is it stable or unstable? If you have a healthy case of synaesthesia, get your other senses involved. Does a perfect fifth seem blue or green to you? Does it feel rough or smooth to you? Either way, the idea is to dissect your association with an interval or tone so that you can recall it in a useful manner later.
Stuff for the group
 fig. 1
(Exercise 4) This one I’m stealing from Tim Bonjiovani and rehearsals with the Berklee Method. Have your director write out some sort of voice leading or chord progression prior to rehearsal. Make sure that it starts and ends in perfect unison. Begin the exercise on a common vowel like oo or oh, and hold it until the director gives directions for the next note/chord/whatever. For example, (read along with fig.1) while everyone is singing a well-balanced and blended oo, the music director might want to go from I to a IV chord so he might tell the basses to drop to fa, the tenors to hold do, the altos to drop to la and the sopranos to jump to fa. From there, they might go to a V chord with similar voice leading but changed to an open ah sound. Once the V chord is balanced and blended the director might ask a voice to shift to add fa for the dominant seventh on the chord. Then they might resolve back to a triad on the I chord and collapse it back to perfect unison at which point the director would whip out the pitch pipe and check to make sure that the group had retained the correct key. So this is an exercise with multiple facets including ear training, breath support, dynamics, and blending.
I hope that you find this useful since I certainly have. Be patient though, none of this is a quick fix. You might not see growth until a few weeks of practice but I guarantee that if you stay with at least one of these exercises you’ll see improvement or I’ll refund your money and you get to keep the toaster and the bagel slicing attachment for free. So what’s the harm in trying?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synaesthesia
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Last Updated ( Saturday, 09 September 2006 )
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