a popular song

[Bob Stuckey]

Hi All

I have recently been setting the beautiful song the Shadow of Your Smile in chromatic solfa (XroSol) to help see what holds it together. 

A traditional stave is used but in reversed colours to make the note letters stand out. It starts in the minor key with the tonic represented by la and ends up in the relative major. To avoid confusion with the letter name D the major tonic is represented by the initial of its old name ut. However it is still read or sung as do.

Its the last item on this webpage

https://bobstuckey.com/xrosol/the-harmony-of-popular-songs/

Does it help you understand the song and play it in different keys?

Bob

[drtec...@gmail.com]

Bob,

 

For some time I have been printing sheet music in Lilypond using the Aikenheads transformation into shape notes (7 symbols).   [I also use a transform that prints sharps red and flats blue.]

I find this works well for singing, as it transcends differences in key, and helps associate the note with the chord,

once you memorize the principal major and minor chords in solfège spelling. As it is otherwise TN, it also works well for piano, etc. for those already trained at reading TN.

 

May I also remind y’all about my Chromatonnetz 12-symbol shape note system which integrates with Roy Pertchik’s tri-color system for easily identifying chords.  When I had my Chromatone [Janko], it worked well for the isomorphic instrument. If I were to invest in another isomorphic keyboard [Linnstrument? Lumatone? Dodeka?], I would certainly go back to that notation.  But frankly, I’ve found no particular advantage of an isomorphic notation for a non-isomorphic instrument.

A notation homeomorphic to the instrument makes more sense to me.

 

So why don’t I invest in an isomorphic instrument?  I’ve discovered that  “easier to transpose,”  even “easier to play,” is not the same as “easy” to play! It certainly makes no sense to invest in an “unpopular” non-portable instrument, as no one else will have one for you to play on.

 

As for notation, by the time I’ve learned a piece, I’m not sight-reading the notation anymore. A “better” notation helps the for the first couple times thru, but after that I’m just using it as a cue to my memory.

 

Every notation and instrument designer claims their design makes learning “easier”, but I’ve seen no scientific evidence for these claims, much less a quantitative comparison of learning times.

 

And most “isomorphic” instruments or notations don’t come with a “learn to play” method, so one is on one’s own.

I spent some time trying to convert a traditional piano method, even ExpressStave, to isomorphic notation, and discovered that traditional piano instruction is largely concerned with the idiosyncrasies of the piano layout and traditional notation and barely mentions the structure of “music” at all. To find “music” instruction, one needs to consult the vocal pedagogy, such as Kodály.

 

So, we are back to shape notes!

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[Bob Stuckey]

Hi Jo

Sorry to be lazy. Could you resend the first two paragraphs with picture examples or links? 

Bob

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[John Keller]

Hi Bob,

ut = doh to avoid confusion with D. But what about fah and F?

So what did YOU find about the Shadow of Your Smile by notating it in this way? For example?

Do you have printed rather than handwritten notation examples? eg like my solfa notation songs

https://musicnotation.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Degree-1-PDFs.pdf

You probably know I use different syllables for the chromatic degrees

Bob    John

va        zaw

wu       naw

xo        vee

yu       yaw

za       paw

(correct these if im wrong)

 … and I tend to prefer doh minor rather than lah minor. (Unless it is like I will Survive)

So the Shadow goes: s d r n s l.. r t.. y s..s d r n s d=l..r t..s m …. with chords 2, 5, 1 in the minor then relative major.

Cheers

John

[John Keller]

Hi Joseph,

Can you explain or add to this (your quote below)? Did you use some of my pdfs? I dont really yet have a 'piano method' just for ES, in that all my files try to teach both ES and TN at the same time and I am still trialling my methods with beginner kids.

Re how long does it take to learn a notation, surely if you have all staves (registers) read the same and octave similarity, it cuts down the amount of learning time. Not to mention having to do all the key signatures.

When I taught some adults, they could read and play Moonlight sonata mvt 1 from ES after about 1 or 2 years, whereas in TN it is rated as 7th grade.

I am not sure what you mean by learning about the structure of music. Kids learn to read English. Do they need to understand the structure of the English language? 

Cheers,

John

[Bob Stuckey]

Hi John

I am pleased to hear about your similar solfa interests which I must have overlooked.

As XroSol has two forms, lowercase for movable and Upper Case for Fixed, confusion between the adjacent Ds would be heightened if D could mean the Mediterranian fixed Do (France, Italy ,Spain etc ) or the Transatlantic D. So using Ut to represent Do avoids that ambiguity.

The one agreement between Mediterranean and Transatlantic note name is Fa=F, which is to be celebrated.

Re the black note names  were devised by  Richard Parncutt and myself with the aim of extending the vowel and consonant contrasts of the white notes within a 3 guitar fret radius when they are joined by the black notes. They also have the mnemonic of the last letters of the alphabet as initials. Heres the adjusted list. Just two points- xe instead of xo and ze instead of za.

XroSol    John

va          zaw

wu         naw

xe          vee

yu         yaw

ze         paw

The handwritten examples show that it's quite easy to write solfa on a grey-stave and sets off the note names more clearly than your black and white examples which, though printed,  have very cramped noteheads which are not so easy to read.

In an ideal world we would click a button and a score would be shown in XroSol. That's a little way down the road.

Whether to use do or la as the tonic of a minor key? I go for la whenever possible as its very interesting how various chords appear form the two viewpoints, eg r-7 for do its easy - going , whereas for la its a threat and could easily lead to a modulation to do. Or z major, commonly heard in pop music: against do it can sound quite groovy: against la it has the gravity of the Neapolitan chord. And many songs drift back and forth between the relative major and minor.

In our ideal program we would be able to flick through  music from any viewpoint do, la or any of the ten remaining viewpoints of the chromatic scale. This would be useful for looking at bridges which often change key.

If you think there might be advantages in a grey stave for beginners it could be just a matter of clicking a button to change from your preferred solfa grammar to that of XroSol.

Its great to be singing from almost the same hymn sheet.

Bob

https://bobstuckey.com/xrosol/the-harmony-of-popular-song

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/musicnotation/050B5291-429E-41AF-B544-65CB44AEA76D%40bigpond.net.au.

[drtec...@gmail.com]

John,

It’s been a while since I was actively working on Janko and Chromatonnetz.

At one point I had considered taking materials you had shared for ES and “converting” them to the Janko,

But it soon became evident that ES was more about black vs white than about whole-step vs half-step.

The approach to hand and finger position is necessarily different for 6-6 that for 5-7 keyboards.

Bottom line, was not really possible or sensible to try to “convert” 5-7 keyboard instruction to a 6-6 instrument.

 

For a 6-6 keyboard, the 3-4 division (or 5-2) division of the SCALE is of course significant, both physically and musically,

But is wholly unrelated to the 5-7 division of the keyboard.

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[drtec...@gmail.com]

John,

My previous reply was sent prematurely and incomplete.

For one thing, I should have described the minor scale as 2-5, not 5-2.

 

I commend you for your efforts with ExpressStave. You are one of the few persons posting here who have actually “tested” your proposals in practice with real students.  If more of us would do so, we might have more impact! I don’t mean my comments to be taken as criticism of your work, which I think has been quite valuable.

 

I tried using the ES materials you shared with me as a starting point for a “Janko” method,

but encountered the difficulties I mentioned. Your materials seemed to be a “piano” method, and as such must accommodate the 7-5 structure of the piano keyboard, not the 6-6 structure of a Janko.

 

No doubt your approach is effective for piano. I myself started with a 7-5 notations like Klavarskribo and piano roll.  I tried  modifying the KS approach using various shading patterns to make octave separation more apparent. But for me, the biggest obstacle to using a novel notation is getting the music into the notation in the first place.

 

I eventually settled on simply coloring the sharps and flats, and using shape notes, not because I think it’s ideal, but because it’s something supported by Lilypond, which I’ve found easy enough to use for transcribing my music.

Since the methods I was using, and most of the music I play (I mostly do popular songs—32 measures max--not concertos!) are available only in TN, I must first know TN to convert it into the alternative notation.  Since not having to learn or use TN was not possible, I had to rely on other advantages to make conversion worth the effort.

I could imagine in a world in which a “Beginner Piano Method” was already available in ES or KS or Chromatonnetz or whatever, but that is not the present.  I had once imagined that I could transcribe some “Beginner Piano Method” into some alternative notation, specifically an isomorphic notation for a 6-6 instrument using time-proportional rhythm notation, but as I’ve been saying, the structure of most beginner piano methods is focused on the idiosyncrasies of the piano keyboard and traditional notation, and the content just didn’t translate. After removing all the instrument and notation specific content, there wasn’t  much left to use as the basis of a method.

 

I’m wondering whether you have ever attempted to develop a “strings” method based on ES?

That might be a more appropriate starting point for an instrument such as the Linnstrument.

Of course, a flat keyboard or fretboard allows more opportunities for chords than bowed strings.

 

As for the “structure of music”, of course I’m not a professional musician and haven’t formally studied music,

so my comments are merely personal impressions.  That said, it seems to me that music is fundamentally about patterns, patterns of sounds, sounds which vary primarily in pitch and rhythm.  As I’ve said before on this forum, most of the notational improvements posted on MNP seem to be focused on pitch rather than rhythm, though I imagine that, if anything, rhythm is more fundamental.

I’ve been focusing Form, as in ABA or AABA, or what I call the “poetry” of music, as I consider this the most obvious “pattern”, and one which is totally obscured by the traditional practice of squeezing as many notes as possible on the printed line, prose style.

 

Printing music in “stanzas”, poetry-style, exposes the similarity of the “A” lines and contrast of the “B” lines. It also exposes chord progression patterns, such as a change at the end of a line, for example, a line one  I I I V vs. a line two V V V I, or as in the classical 12-bar-blues progression over three lines.

 

Beyond that, the use of shape notes to identify the scale position of notes of a melody or chord allows one to recognize harmonic intervals and chords, assuming one has studied harmony theory and chord structure in terms of solfeggio.  I’ll admit conventional shape-notes do not distinguish major and minor intervals, for which reason I commend attention to my Chromatonnetz shape-note notation which makes such differences notationally explicit.

 

Although recognizing structure may not be necessary to perform the notes, I believe it helps in interpretation and memorization. I think it would be a valuable addition to the typical beginner piano method if they would talk about how one actually composes a song, and discuss the compositional techniques used in the pieces they offer for study.

We don’t really do this for literature either: when I was in school, we learned to read elementary texts composed for the purpose, then were turned loose on “the marketplace” at the public library or bookstore. In school, we studied only the “best” examples of the supposed greatest authors in the language.  In most areas of art besides music, the “creative process” is encouraged: we draw and color original pictures, produce “sculptures” in clay, compose stories prose and express sentiments in poetry. But  I’ve never been in a class where I was taught or even encouraged to write a song.

 

But just as one needs to know more than the alphabet to “compose” a story or poem, one needs to know some basics of what I’m calling the “structure” of music to compose a tune, or even a chord progression accompaniment to a known melody.

And I’m saying there’s little to nothing in TN that exposes much more than the “alphabet” of music.  How do you recognize “syllables”? What delimits “words”? “sentences”?

 

Joe Austin

 

 

From: 'John Keller' via The Music Notation Project | Forum <musicn...@googlegroups.com>
Sent: Saturday, November 4, 2023 5:30 PM
To: musicn...@googlegroups.com
Subject: Re: [MNP] a popular song

 

Hi Joseph,

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[John Keller]

Joe,

Thanks for your encouragement.

Which ES materials did I “share with you”? Or do you just mean any of my Wiki page files?

Yes, piano methods generally have the approach of :

black key 2s and 3s to orient with piano geography

5 consecutive white keys for 5 finger positions, often starting with thumbs on middle C

Sticking to white keys drilling steps and skips, the latter being line to next line or space to next space.

Skips idea leads to triads with beginners pieces focusing on I and V chords and hearing the changes.

Not many methods focus specifically on harmonic forms such as 4 bar sections I I I V, VVV I, etc

However teachers like me do point out these patterns and also encourage composing or improvising using these patterns.

I think they dont always write the music in these poetic layouts for a few reasons:

Not all music is this clearly analysable,

The use of upbeat beginnings (anacruses to phrases) tends to obscure the 4 bar chord patterns

(Chords change at the start of bars, not the start of phrases)

An emphasis is on reading fluently, not necessarily understanding the details of structure.

String methods generally start with open strings and add fingers one by one to form major 5 note patterns.

eg violin teach A B C# D in succession (fingers 0 1 2 3 )

kids are not specifically taught about the 3# key signature, or what is a sharp at first.

tapes are placed on the fingerboard to show finger positions

I think a string method could be translated directly to any AN because the notes are just added one by one in a specific order.

Hey can you show examples of what songs you learn and the notations or layouts you prefer?

Do you have them on a website?

i think it would be good if more people had their work on the MNP Wiki pages to show their development.

I am aiming to have the complete WTC by Bach translated and learnt. Currently up to G minor book 2.

In my teaching i now focus more on TN and the degree card strand, with younger kids learning moveable solfa. 

Older and advanced kids can read from both TN and ES and it helps to compare reading the same piece both ways.

Each has some advantages.

Cheers,

John

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[drtec...@gmail.com]

John,

I’m not sure what exactly you shared because it seems to have gotten lost when I changed from an Apple to a Windows computer some years ago.

But I’d suppose it was an earlier version of “The Keyboard Express” for which you have posted links on MNP. As you might imagine, your “A” section focuses on black vs. white keys, so it doesn’t really translate to 6-6, where the important distinction is between whole-tone rows. Of course your notation distinguishes these with the angle, but the pedagogy didn’t focus on that.

So your NOTATION would be useful for Janko, and for those switching between Janko and piano, but the LESSON BOOK didn’t really offer a useable base for building a Janko instruction method.

 

I appreciate that chords change on the bar whereas “phrases” often change on the up-beat.

And that does present a challenge for notation.  One that has received very little attention from the “alternative notation” community.

One approach would be to offset the “lines” for the melody parts from the chord part—

easy enough if the chords are notated as symbols above the staff.

Of course, some hymnals actually break the lines according to the lyrics and not the measures.

 

I’ve also noticed that “rhythm patterns” often start on the up-beat and end on a sustained pitch.

This seems to be the way I “hear” the pattern, e.g. a typical 6/8 march as dee-DUM, dee-DUM …

 

As for reading fluently, would not “comprehension”, if not reading itself, be facilitated by making the notation structure match the semantic structure?

I understand in the days of Gutenberg pages were precious so one tried to get as much content as possible on one page.

But today paper is cheap, and screen real estate even more so.

So we can economically print “poetry” as “poetry” instead of as prose.

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