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I've been talking to piano teachers around Australia about teaching their beginners, and most teachers here do use the American methods - Alfred, Hal Leonard, Piano Adventures, recently the Premier method from Alfred, less recently Bastien...

There have been many discussions in this forum where I've seen teachers talking about using Movable Do: are there Movable Do method books that any of you use? Or is your use of Movable Do something you 'add' to other materials you are using?

I use movable do, but I don't know of any piano method book which uses it (I do know of a recorder method book that does, however!). I incorporate it into the other materials I use, including some of my own.

I came across one method book for young children which claims to use Kodaly principles and so I thought it might use movable do, but on looking at the website - Dogs and Birds - I find they use animal names for the notes, and the children sing these, which really makes it more of a fixed do method.

Hmm, interesting. It just suddenly occurred to me today that I'd *never* seen a movable do piano method.....

I would quite like to use a fixed Do piano method. I experimented with a new beginner young child recently; teaching her fixed Do solfege. Trouble is I don't know it terribly well (never used it at all and had to look up the sounds and make a chart that I can see during lessons). i realised that I have to practise it myself until more natural, and also integrate it better with my usual methods. Maybe I'll just revert to ABC again.

I can't imagine using movable Do. I grew up with ABCD...

(Australian teacher of beginners)

Good point, Canonie, I can't imagine not calling A A either!! But even so, I'm amazed that so far no one knows of a movable do 'method'.....

Back in ancient history when I was in elementary school, we had daily music class. We were taught do, re, mi, etc. relative to scale degrees of the major scale (no instruments, just singing).

Never heard of fixed do until recently.

Well I hope that i am able to teach students how to internalise the scale degrees in spite of not training them in movable do. Hmmm better remember to make sure that everyone does at least some transposing this term.

Hurray for Holidays; a good time for pondering and preparing (and practising!).

Forte has a fixed do method called Music Munchkins. Urrghh...

(And at this point I bite my tongue. Hard.)

Laughing at the hard tongue biting..... Fixed do doesn't interest me anyway.....

The closest thing to a true moveable do method in the US is Music Moves for Piano by Marilyn Lowe:

http://www.musicmovesforpiano.com/

I think there was one under development in the UK at one point (someone was working on a Kodaly-based piano method as a dissertation project) but I don't know if it ever found a publisher.

I don't know of such a method, but Bastien does teach transposition early (at least in the adult method), and makes it clear early that every major key has the same structure so that the student can move from key to key easily.

Elene

I've never really understood why someone would prefer 'moveable Do' over 'fixed Do' when teaching note names. The notes on the staff have to have secure, permanent names that students will remember. When using letter names, you don't scramble the names to fit the key do you?

I would think 'moveable Do' could only be used in addition to a letter name musical language already used by a student.

For 'fixed Do' I only know of Yamaha and Harmony Road programs that use solfege as their musical language.

It's not used to teach note names. It teaches sale degrees.

"Doe a deer, a female deer. re ,,,,,,

Yes, so IN ADDITION to a set musical language.

'Fixed Do' for notereading and internalizing actual pitch.

'Moveable Do' for scale degrees/intervals.

My mom grew up in rural south China. In school, she was taught to sing in doh-re-mi. She could never remember the lyrics to songs. I grew up listening to her sing all the songs in doh-re-mi, even the songs that I brought home from school. It is now ingrained in me so much that when I listen to music in the major or minor diatonic scale, I cannot get away from matching the solfege syllables to the pitch.

If the song modulates, the whole scale is repositioned to a new doh. When we get to some jazz music, the tonic is identified, and the scale is adapted with the raised or lowered notes. Internally, that translated very well when memorizing and analyzing my piano pieces.

I grew up in a church where the entire hymnal is written out like:

Eb major
1 1 2 3 | 4 - - - etc.

and the entire congregation knows how to read music that way. It's not doh-re-mi, but it's still the concept of a symbol matching the degree of a scale. Notes lower than 1 has a dot at the bottom. Notes higher than 7 has a dot at the top. Eighth notes are underlined. Sixteenth notes are double-underlined.

I don't anything about solfege as a piano method - or specifically applied to piano. I also never had formal training in solfege. But once it got inside my system, it definitely helped with my piano and theory.

May I ask, what do you mean by a movable do piano method? I cannot grasp the idea at all.

Scale degrees instead of notes. Doe is always the tonic no matter what key the piece is in.

I know what movable-do solfège is, but I had the impresion that Elissa means a piano method that uses movable do in some way.

That's just when you can use movable do. Letter names for fixed pitch, movable do solfa for scale degrees. Goes well together because they are used in different contexts.
What doesn't work (or works less well) is to combine fixed and movable do - where the same terminology means two different things.

I'm not answering for Elissa, but I understood her to mean a piano method book that (in addition to teaching letter names as the fixed pitches) teaches the concept of scale degrees and their relationship to each other by using movable do solfa (incorporating singing as well as playing).