Welcome to the Do Re Mi Vocal Gym! Recently, I became re-interested in solfège, which I (like most of us) first learned from Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music. As Maria von Trapp taught us, learning your “do re mi’s” is a great way to understand more about the way music is constructed. Furthermore, solfège is AWESOME for your brain. Our motto in this class will be:
By the way, the name of our cartoon mascot that you see above is Mila the Deer (Get it? Mi-la?)
SOLFÈGE AND YOUR BRAIN
There is a wide, thick bundle of nerves in your brain called the corpus callosum that joins your two brain hemispheres (“Corpus callosum” means “tough body” in Latin).
Musicians have been shown to have more robust corpus callosums; the particular skill of music requires excellent coordination between the left hemisphere (which is responsible for the more “mathematical” elements of music) and the right hemisphere (which is responsible for the more melodic elements of music).
Solfège takes things one step further, requiring communication between the language centers (in the left brain) and pitch centers (in the right brain). Associating a word with a note takes a lot of neural finesse. The harder things get in this class, you are pretty much guaranteed to find some good challenges for your corpus callosum.
Here’s what you’re going to get in this class; I’ve created twelve original and progressive solfège exercise patterns for you. They start easy and get, um, a bit challenging by the end. For each lesson, you’ll start with a video where I teach you the exercise and its variations. Then, you’ll try the drill at one of three speeds:
- Slow Re Mi (nice and easy)
- Do Re Medium (for the moderates among you)
- Go-go-go Re Mi (for the solfège superstars out there)
(All the videos have captions; you can turn them on by clicking the “CC” button at the bottom of the video screen.)
After you finish one of the solfège exercises, sing a phrase or two of your own music. See if warming your brain up with “do re mi” helps your other repertoire feel easier to sing.
Grab some tea (ti?), jam, and bread, and let’s get singing!
