John Curwen News
British minister, publisher and inventor of Tonic sol-fa singing method (1816-1880)
- educational music
- United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland
- music teacher
Last update
2024-03-29
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2015-09-11 18:20:53
[…] work on the material the choir was preparing for performance. Any teacher or director who uses solfège will collect these sorts of exercises, games, and activities as ways to address or develop specific skills and competencies. For instance – and this is a common technique I believe – with children’s choirs trained on solfège and hand signs, one warm-up I frequently used was to split the choir into two groups and stand before them using Curwen hand signs with both hands, my left hand indicating what one half of the choir would sing and my right hand indicating for the other half. The simplest form of this exercise would be to hold one group on do while the other group sang the scale slowly and deliberately, tuning each interval, ascending and descending – and then repeating the same exercise reversing the role each group had played in the first time […]
2015-09-01 02:01:10
[…] must thank my friend and mentor Michael Graham, who initially taught the method I describe here to the choirs of Nashville School of the Arts for many years before me. Any mistakes, inefficiencies, or things you don’t like here are entirely my own, however. Solfège as a music literacy component in elementary school In comprehensive music programs I taught at elementary schools in New York and Nashville, I used solfège beginning in Kindergarten, along with Curwen Hand Signs , almost invariably when teaching new songs. In these programs I taught songs to elementary schoolers by rote (introducing singing from written notation in middle school), but by incorporating both the syllables and the hand signs into the process, students learned a rudimentary “nomenclature and gesture notation” almost effortlessly. When the time came to begin reading traditional notation, it was a small step for the students who already had several years of […]
2015-08-12 00:43:13
[…] age, grade level, and accomplishment level of the students involved. But the general idea was the same. Music to be learned (e.g. a song, a choral piece) was taught by first singing the pitches of the melody (or choral parts) on solfège syllables, and pitch and rhythm mastered before text was introduced, as a rule. With younger children (elementary school) songs were taught first by rote (imitative call and response style) on solfège syllables with Curwen hand signs; with older children, students marked their (notated) music with solfège syllables and sang from that until the choir was ready to move on to text. The assignment of a distinct syllable to each note of the scale is called solmization, and is the basic principle of solfège. An example of a song “marked in solfège”. How Great is the Pleasure was traditionally one of the first songs students learned when they […]
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