Language and Thought: the example of solfege

[gusl]

Verbal Association. At this level, students associate vocabulary names and proper names with the patterns, functions, tonalities, and meters they learned at the aural/oral level. The tonal and rhythm patterns taught at the aural/oral level are learned with appropriate tonal solfege syllables or rhythm solfege syllables. Verbal association facilitates discrimination between patterns. Without it, students would be unable to keep track of more than about ten patterns of each type. Assigning a unique "name" for each pattern through solfege serves much the same purpose in music as naming objects and concepts in language. We think with words, and the more words we have in our language vocabulary the better is the quality of our thinking. So, too, in audiation, and verbal association facilitates the development of a large vocabulary of tonal and rhythm patterns.

Two types of verbal association are used. The main type is the rhythm and tonal solfege syllables assigned to individual pitches or durations in tonal and rhythm patterns (for example, the tonal syllables do-mi-so for the notes C-E-G in C major). The other type, Verbal Association/Proper Names, refers to the names given tonalities, meters, and functions. Students learn to identify various tonalities (major, minor, dorian, mixolydian, and so on), tonal functions (tonic, dominant, subdominant, and so on), meters (duple, triple, unusual, and so on), and rhythm functions (macrobeats, microbeats, divisions, and so on). Note that music theory is NOT taught at this level of skill learning sequence. Students are taught the names and makeup of musical concepts (for example, that tonic patterns in major are comprised of some arrangement of do-mi-so), but not the "why" behind those concepts (for example, that a tonic chord in major includes a major third and a perfect fifth).

The site seems worth checking out in general: http://www.giml.org/

Domenico di Masi also mentioned this idea in his book "the Creative Ocium".