minstrel: Sight-Singing Tests

[Tibicen]

Wrote Glenn:

> This is half of the reason I don't call myself a singer.  (The
> other half is that my ability to sing in key is inconsistent.
> One day I'll be spot-on, and the next day I'm all over the map.)
> It's frustrating.  It also glitches me when I try to sing over a
> melodic accompaniment (as opposed to chords).  Vocally, I want
> to follow the dominant melody I'm hearing.

I was at this stage not so long ago, and I still have consistency
issues.  The problem for me was that hearing another voice disoriented
me -- in singing, one has far less muscle memory to use than playing
an instrument, so one has to rely on auditory feedback.  So when
someone else was singing a different part, it washed out my
"landmarks".

What I had to do was learn what it sounded like/felt when I sang
properly under someone else, which to me sounds compeltely different.
That's the other thing -- singing *over* another voice I found to be
much, much easier than singing *under* another voice.  When I decided
I really wanted to learn how to do that, I got myself reassigned to
the alto section, and just made a nuissance of myself until I got it.
Well, am still getting it. :)

The way my brain processes pitch is a little different than I think
stardard sight-singing pedagogy caters to.  While knowing what a jump
up of a fourth is, and how to generate it, is, of course, useful and
important, I found the "identify what the next interval is and go
there" method to just not work for me (at least until very recently).
It's not that I don't know a minor third on the page when I see one --
it's that every minor third sounds different.  I couldn't use (for the
longest time, and still mostly don't use) the sorts of interval
mnemonics that various people have been discussing in another thread.

When I sight-sing, I need to know *to what degree of the scale am I
going*.  Doesn't matter where I *was*/*am*.  This is far more like
solfege.  But it's absolutely critical that I know the tonality and
key note of whatever I'm trying to sing.  

So, for instance, we're currently doing "April is in my mistress'
face" in the Quire; I'm singing alto.  It starts with that S/A duet,
sopranos on a D, altos on a Bb.  I insist on getting not a Bb to
start, but a *G*.  Because we aren't *in* Bb major, we're in G minor
(or is it dorian? I forget).  If I don't get that G, I will be
off-tune in three notes.  On the other hand, given an "Ut", I can then
just start on any degree of the scale indicated.  Almost.  Still
ironing out them sixes and sevens.

And one of the things which would knock me out of the water trying to
sight-sing with other parts is when I would look at something like "F
F G A Bb" and think "Ah, F major: do do re mi fa", and then the basses
would come right on a *D* and, hello, I am now completely disoriented
because we're in D minor.

I don't know how many other people process sound this way, having more
sensitivity to key/mode/chord than linear interval.  I suspect it's far
more than realize it, because I think the phenomenon of "I could read
it by myself just fine, but when the other people also were singing, I
became totally disoriented and none of the pitches were where I
thought they would be" is reasonably common, and most people are not
aware enough of theory or what the other parts are doing, to isolate
the commonality of just when it is they get confused.

One of the advantages of my way of comprehending pitch and reading is
that it makes those chromatic late-period alto lines a piece of cake.
Looking at the second strain of "Pase el agoa" (which we're also
doing), where the altos have (IIRC):

||: ... F# F# G F E D :||

I'm not thinking "Up a semi, down a whole, down a semi, down a whole".
I'm thinking "The key is D minor.  Altos, go to the third of the chord
and modulate us into I (therefor D) major" -- which while esoteric
sounding, is just one of those Stupid Alto Tricks you pick up; altos
are often responsible for doing that, especially at the ends of pieces
-- "Next, go to the root of the iv chord; then the third of the i, the
fifth of the v, and the root of i."

In other word, I'm conceptualizing what I'm doing as part of a
"I-iv-i-v-i" chord sequence -- which is a cakewalk.

OK, maybe I'm nuts.  But I'm *in tune* nuts. :)

> As an instrumentalist, for me this problem completely goes away.
> Though as a music director, I have run into a fair number of
> other people who could only play melody on an instrument.  (This
> is a problem: the folks who can't play harmony lines are usually
> also not the best in the group for playing melody, so the only
> line they can play is the one that's least reasonable to assign
> to them.  There have been some notable exceptions, but this has
> been the general rute.)

Oh, yeah.  Amen.  In addition, I have this issue with female singers,
too, which is deeply exacerbated when parts cross (e.g. "We be
soldiers three").  One winds up with "sopranos by default", who don't
have soprano voices but can't be put under another voice -- and when
parts cross, they get deeply thrown.  

I suspect this is why there are more amateur women than men,
statistically, in choruses: men who are not up to singing under
another voice *don't have that "out"*, in an SATB chorus.

> PS:  Also, speaking as a music director, I really wish more
> folks would learn alto recorder first instead of soprano, so
> that I could start them on internal lines and wait until they're
> ready to play lead before giving them the melody.  *sigh*

"Here.  Borrow my tenor.  It's fingered just like a soprano.  No, I
*insist*.  *Really*."  :) :) :)

-- Tibicen