Tonic Sol Fa Tickets

Details of Tonic Sol fa and the Ticket Luck value

Tonic Sol fa
Tonic sol-fa is an educational technique for teaching sight-singing. This technique was invented by John Curwen. This technique uses a system of musical notation based on movable do solfege.

Each of its tone is given a name according to its relationship with other tones in the key. The usual staff notation is replaced with anglicized solfege syllables e.g. do, reh, me, fa, so, la, te, do or their abbreviations d,r,m,f,s,l,t,d.

The original Solfege sequence started with Ut which later became Do. Do is chosen to be the tonic of whatever key is being used thus the terminology moveable Do.

By the end of the nineteenth century, this notation was very widespread in Britain, and it became standard practice to sell sheet music for popular songs with the tonic sol-fa notation included.

Some of the roots of tonic sol-fa may be found in items such as: the use of syllables in the 11th century by the monk Guido de Arezzo, the cipher notation proposed by Jean-Jacques Rousseau in France in 1746, its further development by Pierre Galin and popularization by Aim? Paris and Emile Chev?, and the Norwich sol-fa of Sarah Ann Glover of England.

Reverend John Curwen was instrumental in the development of tonic sol-fa in England, and was chiefly responsible for its popularity.When John Windet printed the edition of the Sternhold and Hopkins Psalter, he added the initials of the six syllables of Guido (U, R, M, F, S, L) underneath the note.

Windet explained, I have caused a new print of note to be made with letter to be joined to every note whereby thou mayest know how to call every note by his right name.

Though the method was never widely received, B. C. Unseld and Theodore F. Seward, with Biglow and Main publishers, imported Curwens tonic sol-fa to the United States. Prior to this, the 9th edition of the Bay Psalm Book (Boston, USA) had appeared with the initials of four-note syllables (fa, sol, la, me) underneath the staff.

Reverend John Tufts, in his An Introduction to the Singing of Psalm Tunes indicated rhythm by punctuation marks to the right of the letters.

These may be considered American forerunners of Curwens system, though he may not have been aware of them. Tufts Introduction was popular, going through several editions.

Nevertheless, his work probably did more to pave the way for shape notes. When Unseld and Steward introduced tonic sol-fa in the late 1800s, it was considered something new.

Building on Curwens work, Zolt?n Kod?ly of Hungary championed the system in more modern times. He introduced a set of hand signals which correspond to each solfege syllable. Later on Roberto Goitre printed one of the most important modern versions of the method in Cantar Leggendo with the moveable Do.

All musicians that use functional solmization use do to represent the tonic also known as the keynote in the major mode. Solmization represents the functions of pitches such as tonic sol-fa is called functional solmization. However, approaches to the minor mode fall into two camps.

Some musicians use do to represent the tonic in minor, which is a parallel approach, whereas others prefer to label the tonic in minor as la, which is a relative approach.

Both systems have their advantages: One system more directly represents the scale-degree functions of the pitches in a key and the other more directly represents the intervals between pitches in any given key signature.