Dalcroze Solfege Games with Gregory Ristow

Eurhythmics teaches music through movement, improvisation and play. In this episode, Greg Ristow shares some favorite games for teaching solfege drawn from the Dalcroze approach to music education.

Videos:

Bodyfege for teaching solfege: https://youtu.be/ArVsGHZ8pTE

Doop Canon for teaching Quarter, Eighth, Half and Whole Notes: https://youtu.be/kj7tNtNHeVM

Links:

Urista, Diane. The Moving Body in the Aural Skills Classroom

Ristow, Gregory. An Introduction to Dalcroze's Solfège Pedagogy

Ristow, Thomsen and Urista. Dalcroze's Approach to Solfège and Ear Training for the Undergraduate Aural Skills Curriculum

Dalcroze Eurhythmics with Lisa Parker (YouTube)

Show Notes:

00:23 Introductions

01:40 What is Dalcroze Eurhythmics?

04:00 Dalcroze Eurhythmics has been around for a while, but not that many people teach it, why?

07:05 Let's do some Dalcroze solfege games together.

07:44 Goals of Dalcroze Eurhythmics solfege training: Ground in students a sense of the feeling of each degree of the scale, and build the skills that allow them to translate immediately between knowing where they are in a scale and knowing what note that is (if they know what key they're in).

08:10 Solfege systems used in Dalcroze Eurhythmics. Eurhythmics teachers use two systems: one system to identify where we are in the scale (functional), such as moveable Do or scale degrees. One system to identify the letter name/pitch level of the note (phenomenological), such as fixed Do or letter names.

09:20 Bodyfege

12:00 Pacing of introducing notes over multiple classes. Changing the roles, having students lead the exercise to build improvisation skills.

13:30 Dalcroze games enable students to learn from each other, because they can look around and see how other students are moving, and help each other to find the right answer.

19:00 Bodyfege is a great game to sprinkle in for about 30-seconds at a time in each class over a long period of time.

19:30 To build translation between function (scale degrees/moveable do) and pitch space (letter names/fixed do), you can do Bodyfege using either.

20:20 Why do we leave out accidentals and syllable alterations for chromatics in Fixed Do, and usually not sing accidentals for letter names, for Dalcroze Solfege?

24:00 Relation of Bodyfege to Kodaly/Curwen hand signs

25:00 Partnering vs groups for Bodyfege.

27:00 In Dalcroze pedagogy there's no fixed version of any activity. Each game is an invitation to create a new variant of it to fit the students you have at that moment.

27:30 Dalcroze C-to-C Scales: Goal of making it possible to hear any note as any degree of the scale.

32:30 Using C-to-C scales to build fluency of translation between scale degrees/function and letter names/pitch space.

34:05 Different ways of prompting C-to-C scales

36:00 C-to-C scales help students call to mind harmonic context for parts of a scale.

36:45 Prompting C-to-C scale with a V7 chord with C on top.

39:45 The whisk and cluster prompt for C-to-C scales.

43:41 Using and trusting physical knowledge -- whether knowledge of what something feels like in the hands at an instrument, or the physical emotional feel of a scale degree

45:20 Modulation Exercises

47:45 An example of Dalcrozian way of teaching rhythm -- "Doop Canon"

50:30 The importance of keeping exercises musical

51:50 Teaching the layering and relation of rhythms

53:30 Ways of spinning out the Doop Canon into improvisation and rhythmic dictation

57:00 Learning through Play

58:05 Wrap-up & sign-off

Transcript:

[music]

0:00:00.0 Theme Song These are the notes from the staff where we talk about our point of view, and we share the things we're gonna do, and we hope you're learning something new, 'cause the path to mastering theory begins with you.

0:00:21.6 David Newman: Welcome to notes from the staff, a podcast from the creators of uTheory where we dive into conversations about music theory, ear training and music technology with members of the uTheory staff and thought leaders from the world of music education.

0:00:35.0 Greg Ristow: Hi, I'm Greg Ristow founder of uTheory and associate professor of conducting at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music.

0:00:42.1 DN: And I'm David Newman. I teach voice and music theory at James Madison University and I code and create conten