The mention of solfa can strike fear into the hearts of many piano teachers. Their head is filled with questions and curiosities, and concerns about their own singing abilities.
But solfa can be a fantastic tool to have at your disposal and it doesn’t have to be difficult or scary. And you don’t have to be a Kodály expert to make use of solfa in your piano studio either.
I’m hoping the simple exercises I share with you in this post will help you to feel confident getting going with solfa in your piano lessons.
First though, let’s clear up all the terminology nonsense. What even IS solfa?
What is solfa?
Solfa is simply another musical vocabulary and is particularly useful for singing. If you’ve seen The Sound of Music you’ll already know that the notes of the major scale in solfa are:
do re mi fa so la ti do
There are additional syllables which are used for sharpened or flattened notes. The only two you’re likely to need are:
- fi – sharpened fa
- si – sharpened so
The reason you probably only need these for now that they’re the sharpened 6th and 7th in the melodic minor scale.
(If that doesn’t make sense to you right now, don’t worry just focus on the major scale first. Let’s keep it moving!)
Fixed do…movable do…huh?!
Part of the big confusion around solfa for piano teachers who haven’t encountered it before is the 2 (or 3) systems.
When I talk about solfa on the blog and elsewhere, I’m referring to movable do. That means that do is always the tonic note of the major scale.
For clarity, I refer to a fixed do system as solfege (although the words are used interchangeably and inconsistently). In fixed do solfege do is always C.
Fixed do solfege is really just another way of naming notes. It’s a replacement for C D E F G A B…it does not do the same job that movable do solfa does. Many countries use solfege as their primary note naming system such as China, most French speaking countries, and most Spanish speaking countries, and many more.
In my opinion there is no point to using both C D E F G A B C and do re mi fa so la ti do to name our notes. I see no advantage to using this system if you are in a country that uses the music alphabet.
By the way, I see no disadvantage to using fixed do solfege as your primary note naming method either. They’re just names after all. We could call them flib gib bib tib sib kib hib squib if we wanted. It wouldn’t change the frequency of the pitches.
Ok, but what’s the story with minors?
To add yet more mudiness to the issue, some who use movable do solfa also move the do when the modality changes…in other words, they always make do the tonic of the scale.
On the surface, this might sound sensible, but it actually defeats some of the magic of solfa.
For those of us with good relative pitch (but not absolute pitch) singing or hearing the E major scale and the B flat major scale feels about the same. Sure, if we hear one after the other they’re different but they feel the same in essence because the pattern of intervals is the same.
A minor scale feels and sounds completely different. So if we sing do re mi fa so la ti do as a minor scale then it’s meaningless. Those syllables no longer allow us to develop a feeling of where we are in the scale.
Which is why I prefer a la based minor approach. This essentially means that the solfa follows the key signature, not the scale/modality. It makes for a much more useful tool.
My favourite version of solfa for piano teachers
So to clarify, this is my preferred system of solfa:
- do = the tonic of the major scale of the key signature
- la = the tonic of the minor scale
Now that that confusion is (hopefully) cleared up, let’s get on to why you might want to use solfa in your piano studio.
What the point of solfa for piano teachers?
The first reason is very simple: it’s easy to sing.
Just try singing “G G G E flat, F F F D”. Not very comfortable, is it?
Now sing “mi mi mi do, re re re ti”. Ah, much nicer.
That’s not the only reason of course. Solfa isn’t just easier to sing – it also gives us more information.
By understanding notes in terms of their place in the scale, we can instinctively do things that would otherwise be difficult, like transposing and chord analysis.
Solfa can also help piano students to become better sight-readers. Because solfa can aid us in feeling relative pitch, it makes it easier for students to hear written music in their head.
It’s much easier to sight-read music if you already pretty much know how it goes. (If you’ve ever seen a student “read” an impossibly difficult pop rhythm you’ve seen this effect in action.)
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Getting started with solfa in your piano lessons
Are you convinced that you should incorporate some solfa work into your piano lessons?
Awesome. Let me help you get started.
Warmups
You don’t have to be an amazing singer (I certainly amn’t!) to bring some solfa warmups into your routine.
For piano students I like to start with do re mi and I do this using my solfa posters. I point to them, we jump on them, and lately we bring some boomwhackers into the mix too to add to the fun!
Ear-training
Solfa is great for ear-training. Try this exercise shown in my recent quick clip video. It’s simple and also super fast to do so it won’t steal away tons of precious lesson time.
Sight Singing
Sight singing is actually the reason I started bringing solfa into my piano lessons in the first place. It’s very helpful not just for the singing skills developed, but also to work on students’ understanding of intervals on the staff.
You can see how I use sight singing in my Thinking Theory books in this video.
Transposing
Solfa can also be used to start a conversation about transposing, in a language that kids can understand. E.g. “If we make this note mi, where are do and re?”
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Are you a beginner to solfa?
I know I certainly was only a few years ago. I hope this article will help you to gain some confidence using solfa in your piano studio.
Let me know what you think about the role of solfa in piano lessons in the comments below or in the Vibrant Music Studio Teachers group on Facebook.
I have really enjoyed your teaching videos and helpful hints. I wondered after looking at your thinking theory books if there is a version that uses the terminology we use here in the U.S.? My teaching has evolved from being focused totally on note reading to finding great value in learning by rote using patterns and seeing how it helps to develop creativity.
Hey Nancy! The Thinking Theory books are indeed available with both types of terminology. Just select “USA version” when you’re adding it to the cart.
Glad you’re enjoying the resources! 🙂
In my country we use Do re mi fa sol system to name the notes but because I teach music in a british school as well I use the alphabet! What I recon is that because notes on the stave have a sequence/order as the alphabet it’s easier to learn how to find them on the stave but using do re mi sounds more musical and some of my piano students tell me that they can hear “do” (e.g) when I play them the note on the piano!
Yes, it’s interesting comparing fixed do and alphabet note names. These are much more similar in fact than movable do and fixed do – which is confusing for some!
For my beginning students I use Old MacDonald singing “mi mi re re do. And on that farm he sang this song: mi mi re re do. With a do do here and a do do there” etc. I play the song on my keyboard and they join in on the piano for the mmrrd on the 3 black keys also finding do in various octaves for the ‘here’ and ‘there’. Later we do this on white keys too, and it really explains the concept of do as the tonic as we learn to navigate the keyboard.
I love this Sarah! I think sometimes I jump too quickly/directly to full songs in solfa but this is a great segway.
I teach voice and flute as well as piano (piano being the instrument in which I have no degree and at which I have no innate talent!) and have always used solfege with all of my students. I have a series of solfege exercises starting with the major scale and its two tetrachords that I also have students learn by rote, and the younger ones love the “challenge” of getting each exercise learned, first in C major, and then in other keys. Thank you for the hand sign posters. I just wish we didn’t have to subscribe anew each time (and then unsubscribe).
Hi Patricia! Thanks for sharing your thoughts, it’s great to get a singing teacher’s perspective!
As for subscribing and unsubscribing. First of all, you do have to subscribe each time – but you don’t have to unsubscribe. You won’t be on the list twice or anything like that.
Second of all, there is a solution to this where all the resources are organised and immediately downloadable: Vibrant Music Teaching. That’s my membership website. I’m happy to provide some resources for free here too and will continue to do so – but it’s up to each individual whether they prefer the free version or the support and convenience of the paid version.
Thanks Nicola! I really enjoyed the post. I’ve been wanting to incorporate more solfa/solfege into my teaching more regularly. These are wonderful ideas!
Great, glad you enjoyed it!
I use moveable DO system with all my piano ( and theory ) students. The most valuable thing it gives them is the fact they can hear (imagine) a melody before starting playing. It means the student fluent in solfa can spot a mistake of finger since she already knows “ what it sounds like”. And what you mentioned before – improves sight reading or singing, transposing is piece of cake for them and singing improves in pitch.
That’s HUGE. 😀
Question! I’d like to use solfa with a few of my younger preschoolers, but am implementing the Piano Safari method, which uses the musical alphabet. Are you saying not to use sofla and teach ABCDEFG at the same time?
No, I’m not saying that at all. I’m talking about movable do solfa, not fixed. Fixed do is instead of CDE movable do should be used as well as because it does a different job.