Studying music in the United States for a while, I realized that sometimes you can actually learn much more from observing musicians, music teachers and their students, rather than from what you’ve been directly told to practice. In this post I would like to discuss the debates about Fixed Do vs. Movable Do solfege systems.
As some of you may faced, that even if the school teaches soflege, using Movable Do, a lot of teachers, personally, would go in a favor of the opposite one – Fixed Do. I would take a guess and say, that they probably saw a better results when the other system was used. Some of them would even say, that the ear-training classes are better taught in Europe rather than here in US.
On one hand, I can see the advantage of a Movable Do system – it helps to see/hear relations between different degrees of the scale. It’s like 1,2,3,4,5,6,7 but do, re, mi, fa, sol, la, ti instead of numbers. Of course, it’s getting harder when you getting to pieces with a lot of modulations going on throw out the piece (which a real music usually looks like 
), but if you know where it modulates, you can always “move” your Do so. As they say – everything comes with practice.
On the other hand, if you take a look at couple of the books for solfege, which preaching Movable Do system, you will see, by going through different chapters, that the music samples are almost all over the place in regard of tonality – first example will have one flat, second five sharps and so on.
If you saw European sofege books (which of course were written without any idea of other systems), you would see, that amount of accidentals in the key signature increases gradually from the beginning towards the end of the book (or a certain place in it).
Now, as being done with my 2-year ear-training course in the school, I keeping on practicing on my own, still using movable Do system. I’m using four different books for practice:
1) Music For Sight Singing 7th Edition Robert by W. Ottman, Nancy Rogers (the one that we used in school)
2) Essential Ear Training For Today’s Musician by Steve Prosser
3) Chtenie S Lista Na Urokah Sofedgio (Sight Reading in Solfege Class) by G. Fridkin (some Russian book)
4) Solfege de Solfèges by A. Danhauser
#3 and #4 are the European books (Russian and German(?)) and I feel like I getting more by using those ones especially, as each next example stays in the same key as a the previous one. Roughly, it looks like that – you have 30 examples in C major, than 30 in G and so on (see Picture 1 showing a couple of exercises in C major in the beginning of the Chtenie S Lista Na Urokah Sofedgio by G. Fridkin)
Picture 1
I think that approaching one key after another gradually will help developing good habits and good skills. It’s like learning something in 12-keys on your instrument (jazz players are especially on that) – I’ve been told and found it really helpful, that you need to learn it first REALLY GOOD in just one key, THEN other keys will come much easier. I think, it’s relatively the same with the solfege. If you developed a good hearing and solfege skills in one key, it will be easier to develop them in other keys too. Roughly, that’s the idea!
