HERE ARE TWO EXAMPLES of what I more clumsily described in yesterday's post about chanting on two notes. Notice that the first one has re for the tone center (the ending note) and the second one ends on the higher note, "mi". The effect is noticeably different even just using two notes.
Al le lu ia | Al le lu ia | Al le lu ia ||
re mi mi mi | re mi re mi | mi mi mi mi-re ||
re mi mi mi | re mi re mi | mi mi mi mi-re ||
Al le lu ia | Al le lu ia | Al le lu ia | A men ||
mi re mi mi | re mi mi mi | re re re-mi mi | re re-mi ||
mi re mi mi | re mi mi mi | re re re-mi mi | re re-mi ||
Note I have written slurs between more than one note sung on one syllable with a hyphen.
I will leave it to you to experiment with the notes mi and fa (e and f) noting only I think you'll find the effect is quite different especially, in this case, when you make mi the final note instead of the major-minor accustomed ear hearing fa as the tone center and last note.
I should mention something else, if you are typing out your experiments instead of the easier and more flexible practice of writing them by hand, using a monospace font such as is commonly used by programmers is far, far easier and gives better results in coordinating two lines, the text and the notes.
Such a font isn't available in blogger, at least I haven't found it so even copying and pasting the above required me to do some fiddling with the spacing. You can generally find all kinds of those in a good text editor, I use Feather pad but I think all but the simplest text editors give you monospace fonts in a variety of styles.
By far the best thing to do, especially if you've got good handwriting or, better, experience in calligraphic writing, is to write things out by hand. If I had a scanner that's what I'd have done with the examples above. That is if I had a scanner and good hand printing. Even when I do the most sensible thing and use plain block lettering on graph paper it's far from calligraphic.
In researching that I was interested to find out how many countries sensibly use graph paper instead of just lined paper for teaching hand writing and how common it is in many of those countries to continue to use graph paper for everyday writing. I might have developed good handwriting if I had been taught that from the start.
I would recommend using a good pencil, one with a softer lead than the typical 2b or #2 pencil works quite well though a good #2 pencil will be good enough. Ticonderoga pencils aren't what they used to be but they still have good leads and have the best erasers I've ever found at the other end of a pencil. A good white artificial rubber artists eraser is good, too but less convenient for someone used to finding one at the end of a pencil. Cheap erasers that are colored tend to leave stains on the paper.
I think on most scanners, if you wanted to copy your score without the typical blue lines on graph paper, it can be set to make those disappear while copying and printing out the black pencil marks. The brilliant American composer Steve Reich said he gave up writing his scores in pen when he realized that writing them in pencil and copying them gave as good a score to put in the musicians' hands. I'd respected Reich before that but hearing him say that endeared him to me even more. And I'm a really hard sell for the "minimalist" school.
That is, by the way, the advice I always give students unless they have a jerk of a teacher who requires using a fountain pen - hells belles - use a pencil you can erase.
For this project I have developed a variant on the numerical notation used by millions, possibly more than a billion People in Asia and elsewhere, most commonly called "jainpu" but with two crucial differences.
Instead of using the numbers 1-7 I use the do-re-mi syllables* and instead of making it the equivalent of movable-do - typically a piece written in jainpu considers 1 as being the tone center of whatever key is to be played or sung in - do is ALWAYS a c, re is ALWAYS a d, etc. In that most chant is modal instead of major-minor, as movable do and jainpu seem to both assume, it makes no sense to use a movable do system for it. Actually, having been taught movable-do, it sucks.
In what I've been doing in this regard I have used capital letters for the lower octave of a voice and upper case letters for the upper octave, writing lines below or above the syllables if a lower or higher octave note is wanted. As it seems to me to be best to not break with tradition entirely (no matter how rational doing that might seem to be) I have kept the convention of starting octaves on c and not a. So for a two scale range typical of most human songs you would have DO RE MI FA SO LA TI do re mi fa so la ti and the next do above that you would write with a line above the syllable, which I can't do easily in blogger. If you wanted to go below the lower c you would write a line below TI LA SO, etc. which can be done easily on blogger. Just remember to turn it off so the underlining won't go farther than you want it to.
Of course, if you're familiar with standard western musical notation you should feel free to use that. I would suggest looking into using the Lilypond text based music printing program which takes some learning to use but which I like at least as well for many things and far better for some things than any graphic based music editors I've used, the withdrawn Finale, Sibelius, the at least for now freely available and free MuseScore (which actually is better than the for-profit programs I've used).
If you go the Lilypond route, you should look at both the Frescobaldi text editor written for use with Lilypond and also the Denemo keyboard editor (all of these are free) though I find the latter, at least in the version available for the Linux OS I use, a bit glitchy.
Writing out your score on music paper with pencil is a hell of a lot easier, though unless you've got excellent musical calligraphy - I DO NOT - being able to print out a legible score is appreciated by singers and musicians.
*Musically, one of my goals is to encourage ear training and in the beginning of that it's best to leave as few steps between what is written on a page and what is understood by the mind and produced to hear. You can learn to coordinate what you already can imagine, and hear, with marks on a page a lot better if you're secure in knowing what it is you are hearing or supposed to sing or play. Giving you a score in musical notation without any clue as to what that sounds like - the purpose of the solfege syllables - is like asking a toddler to jump hurdles. I'm for knocking down the hurdles at the start, you can put them back up when you are steady on your feet.
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