The research process

My research started with a thorough training over the last five years in the Kodály approach to teaching music and music literacy. This raised questions about how aural understanding of pitch in staff notation works. The learning process of reading and writing staff notation is certainly different in the Kodály approach, based on sound and singing, compared to the most common approach, based on notation and instrumental playing.

In an earlier article I wrote that relative understanding of pitch in staff notation was the only way to create a strong and ‘safe’ connection between sound and symbol in the musical mind. But the comments I received when I send the text to a journal for music theory pedagogy made me realise that this needed more ‘proof’ and thus research. Most musicians seem to understand pitch in staff notation mainly instrumentally, so there is no reason to be aware of any problem.

I did some experiments with students, trying ot redirect the reading of pitch in staff notation from the absolute to a relative approach. But much more test material was needed to make a prima vista test situations possible. I made a collection of scores, written in different forms of notation, to test the effectiveness (in terms of aural imagination) of different ways of reading pitch in sight singing.

The solution to the problem of not being able to understand pitch in staff notation aurally I would like to propose, is to redirect the reading of pitch in staff notation. Not the absolute note name (letter name or fixed-do syllable) is the first information we decipher from the notes in the different positions on the stave, but the function. This I mean quite literally. The proposed reading process is not: “I see a treble clef, a key signature (two sharps), and a note in the first space which thus is called F-sharp (or Fa# in fixed-do syllables). In the major tonality we are in, this is called mi.”[1] I propose to change the notation a bit by using a do-clef (not c-clef!). The only information this clef provides about a written note is its function, not its pitch. The process then works like this: “I see that do in this piece of music is just below the first line of the stave. I read a note that is placed in the first space, so this note is mi.” Fixed-do readers are ‘forced’ to use their solfa syllables relatively now. Tests must show if this can work.

This way of thinking leads to my two hypotheses, saying that we do need functional note names (unique sound names) to be able to aurally understand pitch in staff notation and that the absolute note names (unique pitch names) may be an instrumentally useful, but unnecessary step ‘in between’ in the process of aural imagination. I hope to get answers on the two hypotheses from the experiments with groups of students that will be recorded on video.

The use of the do-clef is not my own invention. It is being used in music methods that include forms of relative understanding of pitch from the very beginning of the process of training in musical literacy.[2] Most of the methods in the Kodály-tradition of teaching music fall into this category.[3] Almost all of these methods make use of some form of do-clef notation for pitch reading in staff notation at a certain stage in the learning process. Why and how is this form of notation used? How is it introduced? How and when is the change to pitch clef notation made? In what way are the relative and absolute reading combined? I will give examples of some methods to explain how the reading and aural understanding of pitch (absolute and relative) in staff notation is handled.