Interesting article on "Movable Do and Fixed Do..." by Art Levine

CHGiffen

I ran across this article: Movable Do and Fixed Do: What they are, what they aren’t, and why “movable do” should be used as the basis for musicianship training, from a couple of years back, at the International Choral Bulletin (ICB) of the International Federation for Choral Music (IFCM). Very informative and well-reasoned (one of the best I've seen).

Andrew_Malton

I totally switched from thinking in terms of fixed do to thinking of moveable do as a result of learning chant. And now all the more so since I direct a schola and use hand gestures. Including Curwen when required, anachronistic though that is.

M. Jackson Osborn

I'll have to read Chuck's article and may or may not change from my affinity to fixed do. It is normative in Europe, and facilitates a more scholarly approach to understanding chant and the modal system - not to mention the tonal system. BUT - I'll read Chuck's article (since it is inherently well recommended) and let you know in a day or so if my mind becomes changed. At present, it seems to me that the system being recommended should be called 'transposed do' rather than 'movable do'.

CHGiffen

I'm actually one who was brought up and still adhere to the fixed Do environment, having regarded moveable Do as just a matter of transposition (which I had learned early on), so I am somewhat in Jackson's camp, too. I did, however, find this article quite comprehensive and cogent as an alternative to what many of us learned. Whether this is the "right" pedagogical viewpoint is probably still up in the air.

Richard Mix

The bizarre theory that the leading tone "si" was mistakenly named for the aeolian mode's sol-sharp discouraged me from reading to the end.

Historically Fixed Do seems to be a newcomer (c1600) and Movable Do is of course used not only by 'non-European' Britons but also in Hungary. Slavs tend to be francophile, but I'm not sure on the situation in other non-latin countries, having only encountered a little bit of 'fixed Ce' in Germany. It's frustrating New Grove doesn't have more detail!

a_f_hawkins

My only musical training was a one week intensive in sight reading. It was taught by a Hungarian who avoided the difficulties with a multi-national class by devising his own note names, equivalent to a moveable-do system.
So a question asked in innocence and ignorance :- is fixed-do just a matter of calling C 'do', and so on?

Viola

I am cursed with perfect pitch (absolute pitch) and at first worried that I wouldn't be able to cope with a movable do. But in fact it is absolutely liberating. You don't have to think about pitch as such, but simply choose an appropriate pitch for the piece. With modern notation if I wish to sing at a (usually) lower pitch I have to consciously transpose each note, which requires effort. I wonder if other people have found the same?

tsoapm

Movable do seems very intuitive to me from the perspective of singing.

MarkS

:- is fixed-do just a matter of calling C 'do', and so on?

So, for instance, in France, the name for the pitch class that English speaking counties would refer to as as 'c' is Do—etc... up the scale. (The seventh scale degree is Si, not Ti). At music school, we used a similar form of 'fixed-Do' by doing all our various ear training/sight-singing drills by using the English pitch names. But after much consideration, I have come to the conclusion that moveable 'Do' is a better teaching tool for most of the music we encounter.

madorganist

I'm fairly new to solfege per se, having learned to sight sing on scale degree numbers in both high school and college. I later familiarized myself with both movable and fixed do, the four syllable system used in shape note singing, and the German note name system. My experience has convinced me that movable do is generally the best for tonal music.

In piano lessons, school music classes, band, and four semesters of aural skills and six of theory, I was always taught to read the key signature by looking at the next-to-last flat or going a half step up from the last sharp. Of course, we were taught that flats and sharps are placed in order of the circle of fifths, but NOTHING was ever said about how the key signature relates to scale degree except for how to find the tonic - and then you have to go a third lower if it's a minor key! In 16th-century counterpoint, we were expected to figure out the other modal relations on our own. Only very recently did I realize that the last sharp in the key signature always shows where ti is, and the last flat always shows where fa is, regardless of mode. Furthermore, the last two sharps or flats always indicate the placement of half steps in the scale, again regardless of mode. It simply wasn't taught that way, and I was late figuring it out because I was always thinking in terms of absolute pitch and keys on the keyboard instead of relatively. It was a revelation for me, and it seems exponentially easier to grasp, especially for singers who don't play instruments.

Schönbergian

In my experience, fixed do is useless as a pedagogical tool. It's essentially just another set of note names, which are ultimately pointless on their own. Moveable do actually teaches you how music WORKS rather than how to sound out arbitrary notes like a pianist pecking at the keyboard with one finger at a time.

As a professional sight-singer, both in churches and out, my entire ability stems from my ability to recognize tonal relationships ahead of time and sing them properly. Knowing that "this note is the 2nd degree of the scale, and typically resolves downward to 1 in Renaissance polyphony, and sounds like this in a V chord" is infinitely more useful than "this note is D".

I don't have perfect pitch, so this may be slanted to my perspective; but, in my mind, if you have perfect pitch, you wouldn't need it anyways. I'm just curious what the pedagogical point of fixed do is beyond score reading on a keyboard instrument, if anyone can provide a grounded answer.

Dixit_Dominus_44

Schönbergian,

I could not agree more with what you have written. I have yet to see a single cogent argument in favor of the “fixed do” system. (I'm not saying they don't exist; only that I have yet to come across one.) In particular, those who would aspire to compose should understand movable do, and the “tendencies” of certain scale degrees.

Welcome to the MusicaSacra Forum!

Categories