Nurturing Musical Imagination through Collaborative Solfeggio:
A New Pedagogy To Foster Musical Literacy

Solfeggio is a musical language that brings meaning to pitch and rhythm. It enables musical understanding by engaging the imagination, and facilitates the ability to compose, improvise, and perform. Unfortunately, some students do not like solfeggio, and believe that the exercises in the books they use for sight reading, do not connect or transfer the when sight-reading their music in ensembles.

Frank Abrahams and Ryan John developed Collaborative Solfeggio in 2014. It is a student-centered approach grounded in the theories of sociotransformative constructivism. Collaborative Solfeggio begins with the familiar or known, and moves through the unknown to the new known. Teaching Collaborative Solfeggio is a 4-step constructivist process. The grand steps are partner, present, personalize, and perform. Repertoire to sight-read is from familiar popular music that the students already listen to outside of school music classes.

Collaborative Solfeggio combines fixed do with movable do used in systems like tonic sol-fa. Fixed do (or stationary do) aids reading and musical notation. Movable do (or tonic sol-fa) develops aural acuity. In addition, students always sight read with harmonic accompaniment. Rhythm must be felt in the body and not necessarily articulated with numbers or time-name syllables. Therefore, when students use Collaborative Solfeggio to count they move their feet.

To investigate the efficacy of Collaborative Solfeggio, the researcher invited 6 high school music teachers to use the materials and instructional sequence with their ensemble students during the fall semester, 2016. They provided teachers with suggestions of popular/commercial songs to consider as repertoire. Research questions inquiring about the extent Collaborative Solfeggio contributes to a student’s person and musical agency, the abilities of students to engage musical imagination to make meaning of the music, and improve sight-reading, framed the study.

Teachers made video recordings of their sessions where they taught Collaborative Solfeggio, and participated in semi-structured interviews with the researcher at 3 points during the project.

Formative, summative, and integrative assessments completed by teachers and students also informed the answers to the research questions. At the end, students did engage imagination, and learned by making learning personal. They found meaning in what they were singing or playing in their ensembles. All believed that the experience did contribute in positive ways to students’ abilities to sight-read. For music education, the project added to the literature on the efficacy of popular music pedagogies.