Tonic Sol-fa and Staff notation.

[tittualex]

Dear Friends,

I have been singing in my church choir for many years and we use tonic sol-fa notations for sight singing.

Later I learned to sight sing with Staff notation too .......

Many of my teachers have pointed out the advantages of Tonic sol-fa over Staff notation (IN SINGING) and vice versa......

I want opinion from the members of this forum.........

Thanks ,
Alex.

[tittualex]

Advantages of Tonic sol-fa over Staff notation ( personal opinion!!!) is that

• Since you are pronouncing a syllable(like ..Doh, re, Mi, Fah...) for each note there is only a rare chance that you will miss a note in a complex musical piece. While in staff notation there is a chance you may miss some notes whose time value is very small.

• Some times I use sol-fa notation for playing Hymns ( I hope my organ teacher is not reading this......... he will kick me if he read this). here in sol-fa you can scale down or up the pitch of the song according to the range of your choir...... and you can still use the same music sheet

Advantages of Staff notation over Tonic sol-fa.....

• It is difficult to represent some complex timings in tonic Sol-fa ..which is easily achieved with staff notation......
• Staff notation is universally accepted while sol-fa is followed by very few.

These are from my personal experience ( and really I don't have much experience at all....) .Please feel free to correct me if I am wrong......

Thanks ,
Alex

[rovikered]

Tonic-Sol-fah used to be very popular in England (over sixty years ago) and was widely taught in schools.
I first became aware of its value long after it ceased to be fashionable and was scarcely used. I was singing in a choir next to an older man singing baritone whose sight-singing was almost faultlessly accurate. He was a better sight-singer than I, a trained musician. When I asked how he came to sight-read so easily in some quite difficult passages he explained that he had been thoroughly taught in school along with all the other children there. I was so impressed that later I invited him to join the bass section in a choir of my own and he was a loyal, efficient member for many years. I became more respectful of the tonic sol-fah system, but it has never come back into favour and remains frowned upon, generally, by professional musicians.
Whilst it appears to be an excellent system, because it is dependent upon a tonal centre in music, it is totally useless in sight-singing atonal music.