Piano World Home Page Forums Our Most Popular Forums Piano Teachers Forum Teaching how to read music- solfege versus letter names

Hello,
I am a piano teacher originally from Europe living in the USA. When I started playing piano as a kid I already knew how to read music using solfege notes in the treble clef and this is why the first piano lessons had two staves with treble clefs. I still internally sing my piano pieces as I play them.
Now I have been teaching piano lessons in the USA for about 10 years now and of course I switched to the letter names but I still have no clue how my students can read the music. They don't know all the notes exactly but they can play it so I let them do it. I tried teaching solfege to some students but then the books are all structured around letter names and they get confused between the two ways of reading. I have also tried notespellers so that they become more confident reading notes but they reject them.

I am starting to feel like I should let go. Just let them play, even if they don't know each note name all the time but I really would like to find a more structured way to help them read other than let them figure it out.
what is the point of reading letter names? I imagine you see/hear melodic shapes, memorize hand movements, etc.. Am I missing something?

Thank you so much !

I know that I'll mess up with this, but what the heck. I can always say I'm sorry on my next post!

You are talking about C D E vs Do Re Mi, right?

So for me, as it stands, and as you present it, it's all the same. It's just a different naming. C for Do and so on.

BUT, there's also the idea of a moveable C (or moveable Do), which is something I never ever knew about, until I started using the pianoworld forums. Apparently this is a method used by Kodaly (??) and other Eastern European traditions, that use the Do, as the tonic in any kind of pitch we're talking about. This is easy to follow and sing along, but my guess is that creates a myriad of other issues (including the fact that my music is too chromatic and atonal in cases, to be held in a moveable Do system).

Next one please!

Thank you Nicokas,
I learned fixed Do solfege as a kid and later in life I took some courses to learn movable do but I still rely more on fixed Do.
The advantage I see between letter names and solfege notes is that you can articulate the later even in fast passages. I remember during my student years playing Chopin etudes really quickly and I still could sing every single note as I played it. To me this is the meaning of reading music., being able to say or sing each note of a score independently of whether you play it not. On the other hand, I recognize it can be a bit pointillist . It wasn't until I let go of the singing a little that I started seeing figures and patterns and motions, so in this sense I think the letter names perhaps allow more freedom. Now I let my students see the variations and the repeats and how the music works in terms of form and that helps them learn a great deal.
So I guess, it depends on how you look at it.
My question is more about the learning process so that I can help my students learn to read using the letter names system because I'm not sure I get it .
So for example they can read the first note of a group and then see if it steps up and if it leaps down a third and then moves back up and it ends on a long note. So they would pay more attention to the first and the last notes of the group and read the notes in the middle in relation ..
Is this the way to read with letter names ?

What if you get students who can't sing or don't want to sing?

I don't teach solfege to my students. The lessons are too short , we don't have time. In any case with beginners we usually sing songs if there are lyrics written. If they don't want to sing I don't force them but I sing and sometimes later on they start singing too and sometimes not.

I think you're limiting your speed if you must articulate with your voice. You need to be able to think much faster than you can sing.

I can think of lots of examples where neither letter names nor solfege syllables would be easy to articulate, for example a trill.

I use this technique to unknowingly slow my Daughter down She likes to speed up when there's something she wants to watch on TV, so, I make sure she sings.

Hi BostonTeacher,

First, the standard caveat: I'm not a piano teacher.

I am from Europe, though, and for as long as I have been reading music (about twenty years now, on and -- mostly -- off), I've used fixed Do solfège for naming notes. That said, I use the other system (letter names) without major difficulty whenever that seems more convenient. I may automatically think of the white key in-between the two black ones as re, but it will still sound the same even if I decide to start thinking of it as D.

I think the problem with your students not knowing the name of every single note on a page isn't that using letter names somehow makes it impossible (or even substantially more difficult) for them to "sing" internally. It's just that they choose not to do it -- probably because they just weren't taught that way.

In Belgium (where I'm from), most students taking up a musical education initially learn to read music not through the playing of an instrument, but exclusively through sight-singing. They keep at it for at least a year before they even get to *touch* an instrument. If that was your introduction to music (and I suspect yours must have been something like it), then of course you will tend to keep "singing" every score that's put in front of you, note by note -- and I put "singing" in quotes here because you and I both know, eventually you stop physically singing. You just audiate (hear the score internally), with or without note names.

Now, I'm guessing that for most of your students, learning to read music wasn't like that. Their first introduction to music notation probably went something like this: "This note on the ledger line in the middle of the grand staff is called middle C. Here is how to find middle C on the piano ...".

I think the most important difference between you and most of your students lies not in the way you name the notes, but in the first thing that comes to mind when you look at a note on the page. For you, that's probably a sound. For most of your students, it's probably a location on the keyboard. Now, if the goal is to learn to translate written sheet music into sounds coming out of a piano, which of those do you think is most useful?

I think associating notation with sound can come in very handy for those who play a string or brass instrument, or any other instrument where the musician has direct control over pitch. Often, for those same people, associating notation with some kind of physical action or location will be unhelpful, because string and brass instruments also allow the production of certain pitches in multiple physically different ways.

But for pianists, who basically have no control over pitch, and whose instrument has one and only one key for each of the pitches it can produce, an automatic notation-key association is, IMO, far more directly useful than a notation-sound association. If you associate notation primarily with sound, your reading process at the piano goes something like this: see the note, name/hear/sing/audiate it, and then go find it. Associating notation directly with physical keyboard location gets rid of the intermediary step. In that way, for pianists at least, it represents an efficiency gain.

So do your students need to "sing" internally, the way you were taught to do? I'm not sure. I think that if you teach them to do it, they'll have to "unlearn", to some extent, in order to sight-read as quickly and accurately as they possibly can. And do they need to know the name of every single note on the page? Not sure about that, either. I think the most important thing for a pianist to know is where a note is located on the piano; not what it's called, or what it's going to sound like. Those things are obviously important for reasons of their own, such as clear communication between teacher and student, and error correction while practicing. I'm arguing, though, that they are not priority number one for pianists.

I believe it's for the above reasons, and then a few others, that most teachers here promote intervallic reading (as you alluded to in your own post: this is middle C, and then the music goes a third down from that in one skip, or an octave up from that in a series of steps ... hey, it's a C major scale, I know how to play that!). I don't think the point of intervallic reading is to literally name every note you encounter along the way ... in fact, I'm pretty sure that is very much *not* the point of it. The point of intervallic reading is to see a note (or chord, or sequence of notes, or ...) on the page, and be able to quickly play it, even if you can't name it, or "hear" it.

BostonTeacher,

I'm not a teacher, but an adult learner. For what it's worth, here's how I learned to read music in New Jersey:

I did have piano lessons as a child, and that was where I learned to read music. It was much as Saranoya describes:

I learned the letter corresponding to each line and space on the staves. I remember being taught this clue: On the top staff the big fancy "G"-looking thing at the beginning of the staff curls around the line for G.

Then I had a cardboard "map" that stood up against the fallboard and had the letters printed on drawings of the keys. You lined middle C on the cardboard map up with middle C on the piano keyboard. So for example, when I saw a middle C note on the page, I looked at the cardboard map and found the key on the piano keyboard.

I don't know how long this process took. A couple of months, maybe? I was about 9.

Certainly I was taught about pitch intervals, octaves, etc. But learning by singing would have been disastrous for me.

For one thing, I sing so poorly that I can't match a pitch to save my soul. For another, after two years on the piano I went on to wind instruments. Singing while playing wouldn't have been possible. I could already read music, but I quickly associated the note (letter) on the staff with a finger combination on the instrument. As on the piano, it was basically "I see D on the page, here's how I get that D out of the instrument."

To be honest, BostonTeacher, I never heard of do-re-mi until I saw The Sound of Music.

Hi Saratoya,

thank you very much for your thoughtful reply. You have gone to the root of the problem as I see it and it's been really helpful to see what I need to do next.
I have been writing you a long reply but I just lost it.
To summarize, thank you for letting me know that the reading system is in fact intervallic singing, so that I won't be as strict with my students if they don't know the note name of the key they are playing. This is going to be nice for them and for me !
What I also was saying in my response was that i don't think that singing note names slows down the process because you sing internally and anyway you can't possibly sing everything because it's harmonic reading so how do we sing 4 or 5 notes at the same time? We don't do that. It's much more complicated than I initially thought.
Singing enhances the playing experience and expressive power. I think the concept of teaching to sing before to play in Europe comes from the notion that all instruments are an extension of the human voice. If you look at the origins of notated music, you will find it was all sung music . the first ensembles back in the renaissance imitated voice choirs, the instruments were meant to be like human voices or to accompany human voice.

Thank you for sharing your experience BrainCramp. it is helpful to understand your process as this is what most people do here. I was just missing a part before but know I get it.
I wanted to tell you that it is normal that you didn't know about do-re-mi, because only singers use this system. When I was in college they called it "solfege for singers" I believe it is a requirement if you want to take a music degree, or maybe it is part of Ear Training. I guess it depends on the school.
As Saratoya said before, in Europe children don't start playing an instrument until they have spent at least one year learning to read music. Most schools won't even let them take instrument lessons if they haven't gone through that process. This is not true in the UK though. In the UK they have the same system as in the USA. I don't know about other countries ! It would be interesting to know

I teach all of my piano students to read notes in solfege first, then letter names much later. I use a solfege-based method, teach them in groups, and include singing as a key activity. Having taught both letter names and solfege to beginning students since 1980, I prefer solfege. My experience has been that students play more musically and have better developed musical ears because of the solfege base.

Pardon my ignorance (I learned music reading using letter names and only know of solfege theoretically) but in countries using fixed do system do people ever refer to titles of works by solfege? Is a piece in C major ever called Do major? I realize that the music publishers, at least in certain countries, do not use such letter names but are solfege names ever used that way in casual conversation?

Ted,

I have friends in France who NEVER refer to their pieces by name. For example, Beethoven's tempest sonata last movement is (sung) "re-fa-mi-re".

Hi Boston,

I have to agree with you. Hearing/singing also strengthens the learning process so people learn the music more fully, and tend to think of music as a linguistic process rather than an abstract skill.

I take it that what you are really noticing in your students is not that they don't know the pitch names of the the notes they play; most likely they do. Rather they don't hear them in their heads in the same way or to the same level of sophistication or discernment as you do.

I've always thought that early music education was done backwards in this country. When I have beginners, I start them by making them learn pitch names and intervals, doing rhythm exercises, and doing simple sight singing for two or three months before they ever touch an instrument. By the time they get to the piano, their reading is strong enough that they don't usually need much help from me with those things. And they actually have some listening skills which can easily be built on as time goes on.

Saranoya:

"I think the most important thing for a pianist to know is where a note is located on the piano; not what it's called, or what it's going to sound like."

I disagree. That approach will make you into some kind of pianist. But it won't make a musician out of you.

Ted,

The answer to your question is yes. When you (people accustomed to the letter naming scheme) say that something is written in C sharp minor, we say it's in the key of do kruis klein. Unlike movable do solfège, fixed do solfège is really just a different naming scheme that otherwise follows all the same rules your letter names do. All it is is translation, where A = la, B = si, C = do, and so on.

Countries where the solfège naming scheme is used do seem to teach music through sight-singing more often, but even that is not absolute. I hear that in the Netherlands, sight singing is taught using the letter names.

Yep. My point exactly.



I am not trying to argue that instantly knowing where a given note is on the keyboard is the *only* thing that's important when playing the piano. If you can also "hear" that note internally before you play it, great. But unlike singing, or playing an instrument like the trombone or the violin, playing the piano does not *require* one to "pre-hear" pitches in order to learn to correctly produce them. A piano student can produce the correct pitch every time even without any kind of internal pitch representation, assuming (s)he knows the location of that pitch on the keyboard, and his/her instrument is well-tuned. It may be *nice* to also have some sense of what the music will sound like, and those who do have that will almost certainly make better musicians. But it is not absolutely required. This is why I think that for a piano student, the notation-location association is the *most* important one to be established. Which is not to say that notation-name and notation-sound are not important, too.

Here's where I'm coming from when I argue the above:

I was taught to read music the same way most everyone around here is: by sight-singing for a year before applying my newfound reading skill to actually playing an instrument. Prior to that, I'd had two years of violin and a few scattered piano lessons using the Suzuki method, at an age when I was not yet deemed old enough to read. I'd also learned to play simple folk tunes on recorder and bagpipes by ear, because there wasn't any sheet music for that (why would there have been?). And I'd sang in a few children's choirs where we learned all the songs by imitation.

Because of all of those early experiences, I am (still) a listener much more than I am a reader. But I'm also "blessed" with a complete lack of anything remotely resembling absolute pitch. I can memorise most music I hear without much conscious effort, then sing it (or just a single voice of it) back to you in a completely foreign key, and I won't even know. So when you put me in front of a score and tell me to play it on the piano, I will "hear" the score in my head (because I was taught to sing scores before I was taught to play them). I will, almost unconsciously, memorise that internal sound representation. And when you ask me tomorrow to sing or play it back to you, I will attempt to do so (not looking at the score, but listening to my memories, because I am a listener by nature), but I may do it in the wrong key. This is because when I memorise something, I memorise the overall "sound shape" of it, but not where it is on my instrument, or what the notes it is composed of are called.

I actually think that, for me at least, it would help *a lot* if notation were more "anchored" to keyboard location than it is now. I think I'm getting there, but it's slow going. And if I ever had a child and he or she wanted to learn to play the piano, I think I would insist on them learning that "notation-location" link first, or at the very least, at the same time as everything else. Because I think that'll make reading so much easier for them than it is for me!

Hi Saranoya,

I find that it's a two-edged sword. Pianists are at a distinct disadvantage because they don't "have" to listen to or hear anything. They can just hit a key without any thought or consideration at all. Many do, and it's a serious limitation.

There are shortcomings to either approach. But I vastly prefer to work with students to overcome your problem, as opposed to the way kids are trained in this country. I really do! If kids aren't trained in any listening/hearing skills in some way similar to your own training across the pond, it's very difficult to get them to the point where they can "hear" anything, or really "think" in music. And their music-making and composing very obviously suffers for it.

BTW, I have it on good authority that having absolute pitch is highly overrated. But good relative pitch is a godsend.

Well I have found that every student must be doing music "theory" (Mark Sarnecki's Music Rudiments; beginner, intermediate, advanced), along with their music. Working their sight reading with their actually writing the note is what I found to help the most.

Just makes them know their notes that much easier when they have to write the notes on the score and then add good sight reading practices to know if they know their notes or not.

I know this is little off topic, but he has a secret to sight reading which I think is absolutely crucial. Best 7 minutes and 42 second I every spend. Take a listen to what he says. Hope you get the "aha" moment I did!

I think we forget what is so important to music lesson!



Check out his other videos at "LivingPianoVideos" on youtube!!!