As I searched for “Singing Lessons for Little Singers” on Amazon.com today, I was shocked to find seller “Origin Media” trying to pass off a copy for $150, nearly ten times the retail price!  This incredibly unethical company was hoping that a customer would accidentally click on the wrong seller and then have to fork over the money to them.  BUYER BEWARE!!!

As I continued to dig, I also discovered the following :

• Origin Media has 149 canned  feedback comments, essentially all of them 5 stars, from imaginary people such as  “Miss Phluffy.”  I can’t prove that these reviews are fake, but what do you think?5 out of 5: “I’m really pleased with my order! It arrived very quickly (3 days before the earliest estimated delivery date) and wasn’t damaged in any way. ”
  Date: May 29, 2011     Rated by Buyer: Miss Phluffy
• My brother also found his book scalped by Origin Media, but the funny thing is he has never actually sold a copy of that book!  Yes, you heard that right.  This book seller intends to wait until you buy the book through them, then they will go and buy it for $15.95 and charge you $149.55, pocketing the $133.60 markup plus $3.99 handling!
• I looked up details about Origin Media and found out it is run by a man named Byron Belitsos, a founder of a prominent 9/11 “Truther” organization.  For those of you who don’t know, “Truthers” are way-out political activists who claim that the 9/11 terrorist attacks were an “inside job” done by our own government.
  “Byron Belitsos is an author, editor, journalist, and book publisher as well as an experienced political activist and practicing mystic. He was an inaugural member of the board of 911truth.org and produced “9/11 Truth Convergence,” one of the first 9/11 conferences. He is the CEO of Origin Press, where he published Inside Job, by Jim Marrs….Byron has been politically active since 1969 in a variety of venues and contexts in the labor and socialist movements and most recently, in the world democracy movement; he is a board member of the Democratic World Federalists. “

So unless you want to pay ten times the retail price for “Little Singers,” knowing that the markup will go into the pockets of an anti-government crook, I suggest you be careful on Amazon until this is taken care of.  You can always purchase “Singing Lessons for Little Singers” without any risk and for a 15% discount at our storefront: Singing Lessons for Little Singers.

Singing Lessons for Little Singers(TM) “Very Young Beginners” series is taylor-made for children ages 4 to 7 from current research and practical experience. In three progressive levels, it teaches professional singing techniques and total musicianship skills.

Level A is the most basic level of Singing Lessons for Little Singers(TM) and is designed to give young singers of preschool and early elementary age (or older, as needed) a solid foundation in the fundamentals of singing and musicianship.

This is a pre-release edition of Level A, made available for teachers who would like to help test the method before it is formally released in January 2011.

$15.95. Order Singing Lessons for Little Singers. More information.

Sign up to help us test it out and I’ll pay you back for your copy, and buy you the first edition when it comes out in January.

Picture by Larry and Laura via Flickr

A child’s job is to play.  I don’t mean on an X-box or sitting in front of Cartoon Network.  I mean real, old-fashioned playing.  Exploring, building, creating, imagining, figuring things out.  Building forts, playing pretend, exploring a park: that is the work of children, and there is nothing better for their mental, physical and emotional development.

The problem with so many music opportunities for children is that they lack one of two essential ingredients: either they lack the “play” element of fun discovery, or they lack pedagogical basis of actually learning musical skills.  How many “music day camps” are there out there that give children things to bang on and songs to sing along to but never explain the concepts of meter and notation, never make an attempt to make sure they’re singing on the right pitches, and never explain to them the difference between their high and low voice?  How many kids and adults “used to” take piano lessons but quit as soon as they could convince their parents that it was way too BORING!  What are we doing here?  Is there no happy middle ground between fluff and the whip?

Of course there is!  Children LOVE music.  They love to sing and dance and bang on things.  They love to learn gestures that accompany songs (think “The Eensy-Weensy Spider”) and they love to pretend that they are a Disney princess or hero singing their favorite songs.  What we sometimes forget is that children also love the sense of accomplishment that comes from learning and performing a song for their parents or peers.  They love passing off a song and putting a sticker on the page to prove it.  They love the satisfaction of seeing all the progress they have made in developing their musical tallents; they just need to be having fun during most of it or they lack the patience to stay with it.

The new Very Early Beginner Level A of Singing Lessons for Little Singers is full of fun games and activities that are all carefully constructed and arranged to ensure that students are learning and progressing in their skills, whether they know it or not!  Games like the vocal “Airplane Ride” to practice raising and lowering pitch, the catchy “Beat Cat” game to practice meter, rhythm and tempo, and the four-verse version of the classic circle-game “Ring Around the Rosies” chock-full of fun actions and movements that will keep students wanting to sing the ingeniously crafted pentatonic melody again and again.  You have never seen a private or group music lesson like this before!  Children will think it is all fun and games, but teachers and parents will see the children learning their scale intervals and singing more in tune, training their melodic and rhythmic “ears,” learning fundamental (potentially voice-saving) singing techniques of support and registration, beginning to read music notation, and fostering abstract musical expression through imaginative lyrics, gestures and motions.

Play is the work of children, but the smart parent ensures that their child’s activities are structured to best facilitate their development.  We buy them good children’s books at their reading level to build their literacy.  We take them to children’s museums that present arts and technology in fun, approachable but genuine ways.  We even buy them cartoon-themed backpacks and school supplies to show them that learning is not all bland drudgery.  Numerous studies have shown that children who participate in genuine music training (with ear and theory training) get better grades in school, have increased mathematical and language abilities, and even have up to a 46% increase in their IQ scores.  (I’ll give you the reference for that study because I know you won’t believe me: Rauscher, Shaw, Levine, Ky and Wright, “Music and Spatial Task Performance: A Causal Relationship,” University of California, Irvine, 1994.)  Do your young children and students a favor and make Singing Lessons for Little Singers a part of their lives.

Unfortunately, many music teachers are also at a loss when it comes to finding the most effective way to teach their students to recognize and sing the correct pitches of songs.  In creating the new “Young Beginner” Level A of Singing Lessons for Little Singers, we have thoroughly researched and tested out several ideas and methods for teaching students to sing in tune and we think we have come up with a pretty good strategy.

1. “Sol-Mi” and the Pentatonic Scale Early music pioneer Zoltan Kodaly observed that around the world, across nearly every culture, children’s folk songs were generally made up of the pentatonic scale and especially the descending minor 3rd (“sol-mi” in solfege).  This ubiquitous interval is also commonly heard in every-day speech inflection including phrases like “fly ball!”, “thank you,” and “kitty.”  Researchers have determined that this interval is so prevalent among children because it is the easiest one for them to hear and copy.  (I watched a video clip recently of a 6-week-old infant singing this interval.  See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHtk8QK8iR4)  Once the minor 3rd (“sol-mi”) is mastered, the major 2nd (“sol-la”) is usually the next to follow.  This phenomenon exists in America as the “childhood taunting song” (G – E – G – E – G – E – A – G – E)  as well and “Ring Around the Rosie,” “It’s Raining, It’s Pouring,” and other songs.  From this basis around “sol”, the rest of the pentatonic scale is progressively filled in (do-re-mi-sol-la”) and often the “fa” is added as well.   Meanwhile, the child has learned nearly every interval they will encounter in singing and many common note sequences.  Surprisingly, this pentatonic-based process for learning pitch and intervals has been used for several decades in American classrooms by teachers trained in the “Kodaly” methodology, and this sequence is heavily used in the new Level A of Singing Lessons for Little Singers.

2. The Body Scale Providing a labeled structure of pitches for young children is not enough, however.  Children are much more kinesthetic than adults and need to be physically doing things to learn best (and maintain attention).  Many teachers pair solfege learning with the 19th century Curwin hand signs, but I have found that for singing purposes they do not do the best job of indicating internally where each pitch is felt as it is sung.  Over the past little while I have developed a system called the Body Scale that I have found to work much better for young children.  It consists simply of students touching certain landmarks on their body for each pitch.  (For example, “sol” is on the cheeks, “mi” is in the middle of the chest, and “do” is on the knees.  The Body Scale does a superb job of 1) showing students the height differentiation of pitches, 2) showing students that low notes are felt lower in the body and high notes are felt higher, 3) helping students find and become comfortable with both their high and low voices, 4) training students to “sing with their whole bodies” and not just their throats, and 5) giving students a physical routine to practice and memorize that provides a greater sense of accomplishment than just singing intervals.  Each step of the Body Scale (except “ti”) is progressively introduced and reinforced in the new Level A of Singing Lessons for Little Singers with exercises, games and activity songs coordinated to teaching young beginning students to hear, recognize and sing intervals and notes in tune.

3. “Copy Cat” and Activity Songs Now that I mentioned them, let’s talk about these activities and songs in the new Level A of Singing Lessons for Little Singers.  Obviously solfege drills, even with physical movements added, are not going to hold the attention of any 4 to 7 year-old for very long.  That is why in the new Level A we have developed a series of fun activities and songs (often the two blur together) that give students an opportunity to develop and use their new singing skills in a fun and satisfying manner.  The concepts of up/down and high/low pitches are taught and used in a series of activities that call on the students to visualize traveling up and down in the air (such as in a rocket; more about this in a later preview).  A “Copy Cat” activity is introduced allowing the teacher to practice pitch and rhythm sequences with the students in a “call and response” manner. And pentatonic pitch sequences and high/low pitch movement are strategically embedded in each song of Level A, ensuring that what is learned by rote and activity is incorporated into real singing of songs.

I have to say that I am very excited about this new level of Singing Lessons for Little Singers.  For either private or group lessons for pre-school and early elementary-aged beginning singers (or even older ones that need help with their pitch), I have not found anything better than what we will soon be releasing.  I can’t wait to get it out there and hear all of your success stories!

-Greg Blankenbehler

Due to distribution complications, we can unfortunately only offer this updated edition of Singing Lessons for Little Singers on our storefront at Lulu.com.  It sells for $15.95, the same price as the original.

Up until this point, I had never considered that the ability to name the pitches that I could hear was not shared by everyone.  Since then, I have learned that perfect or absolute pitch is a unique ability (perhaps comparable to the photographic memory) that is only experienced by 1 in 10,000 people.

How Does Perfect Pitch Work?

For someone with perfect pitch, every tone they hear fits in a specific place on their internal keyboard.

Perfect pitch (usually referred to as “absolute pitch recognition” by scientists) is the capability of certain people to hear a note, without any harmonic context, and correctly identify its pitch.  It is different from “relative pitch,” the ability to correctly identify note pitches based on their relationship to another note.  (Eg. If someone plays a ‘C’ and from that you figure out the distance to sing an F-sharp back.)  Rather than measuring the interval to the next note, as most musicians do, individuals with perfect pitch jump to each pitch as if it were a landmark on the ground.  Their mind works like a piano keyboard: each pitch has its own place and anything in-between is simply a flat or sharp version of one of the real notes.  Singing a string of random notes (such as ‘D’ ‘G-flat’ ‘E’ ‘C-sharp’ ‘B’) correct on the first try is no harder for them than if would be for a pianist to play them on the piano.  To people who find this ability hard to believe, I remind them that just about all people can recognize a certain shade of color without comparing it to another.  In practice, absolute pitch ability works about the same, except instead of colors, some people can recognize pitch.

If you want to test yourself for perfect pitch, try this survey and test from University of California, San Francisco.

How Do You Get Perfect Pitch?

Scientists are not certain how perfect pitch is developed, but there is a general consensus that it is a mixture of genetics and early-aged exposure/training.  A recent study reported by the American Psychological Association reports that almost everyone may be born with the ability to recognize absolute pitches as an infant, a hard-wired sense to facilitate language-learning, but that the ability disappears for good if it is not developed.

Jenny Saffran, PhD, a psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and her colleagues reached this conclusion by playing a random sequence of notes for 20 8-month-olds. Immediately afterward, half of the babies listened to a set of notes taken from the previously heard stream. The other group of infants listened to a set of notes that were the same tune as the original note stream, just transposed to a different key. That is, the notes’ relationship to each other did not change, but their absolute pitches did.

A recent study reported by the APA suggests that all babies are born with perfect pitch, and the ability fades over time from disuse.

The infants who heard excerpts from the note stream transposed to a different key paid attention to the recording about one second longer than the infants who heard the exact same pitches as before.

Babies pay more attention to novel sounds than ones they’ve recently heard, Saffran says. Therefore, the study suggests that infants recall the absolute pitch of notes and notice when they are transposed, she says.

Adults in a similar experiment, however, did not distinguish between the two groups of notes–they recalled the notes’ relationship to each other, but not their pitches, Saffran adds.

Though they are born hard-wired to recognize absolute pitches, in their first few years most children in America and Europe quickly lose their ability to do so because that skill is not practiced.  In Western languages absolute pitch is not typically used, but rather relative pitch: we raise the pitch of our voice to emphasize or indicate we are asking a question, but it is not important what specific pitch the voice rests upon.  This is not true in tonal languages, such as Mandarin, however in which words must be intoned on certain absolute pitches or risk misinterpretation.  Children who speak a tonal language, therefore, have a district advantage at developing perfect pitch:

Diana Deutsch, PhD, a psychology professor at the University of California, San Diego, tested this hypothesis by playing 36 notes to a group of 88 Mandarin-speaking Chinese music students and 155 English-speaking American music students. The students wrote down the name of each note after hearing it played. [...]

Of the Chinese music students, 63 percent named the notes correctly–within a half step–at least 85 percent of the time. Of the American students, only 7 percent met the criteria for absolute pitch.

To develop perfect pitch, children typically must begin music instruction before the age of 6.

Speaking a tonal language is not a fail-proof answer to develop perfect pitch, however.  Absolute pitch requires that the individual marry a sensibility to pitch level with a knowledge and experience of the structure of the musical scale to the point that their brain knows no other explanation for pitch.  If a given tone has a discernible fundamental frequency, it cannot help but label it with a pitch, even if the sound is coming from a chain-saw or the squeak of a shoe on a gym floor.  Studies have shown that this thorough education of the musical scale must usually be given while the brain is still formatting for language, typically before the age of 6.  That the training is on an instrument (rather than singing, which is almost always performed by children without a thought for what pitch they are on), and even better, an instrument that requires repetitive tuning (such as the violin) all increase the likelihood of developing perfect pitch.

Even with early music education and tonal language experience, however, a large percentage of children still do not develop perfect pitch.  Studies have shown a few factors that seem to indicate that there is indeed an element of heredity to the possibility of a child developing perfect pitch.  Researchers at the University of California, San Francisco have been conducting a study that involves identifying individuals with absolute pitch recognition and studying any genetic similarities.  Already, they have determined that the ability seems to run in families: assuming that both individuals have had early music training, the one with a sibling with perfect pitch is 15 times more likely to have the ability themselves.  The graph they have generated of the results of participants taking their “Perfect Pitch Test” shows distinct groupings of high and low scores on pitch recognition with little in the middle, showing that when it comes to perfect pitch “either you got it or your don’t.”  Researchers even think that they may have identified a few specific genes that are shared by possessors of perfect pitch.

What’s It Like to Have Perfect Pitch?

As stated above, having perfect pitch is like hearing the world through a keyboard in your head: Every sound that has a discernible pitch (some are just noise and don’t) can be identified as a specific pitch.  If the sound is not exactly on a pitch, the listener will interpret it as a slightly out-of-tune version of the pitch it is closest to.  This doesn’t mean that every time someone talks a person with perfect pitch is tracking the pitches they are intoning on.  Fortunately, the brain usually filters out that kind of useless information or we might go crazy!  But if they choose to focus in on that, then yes, a person with perfect pitch could probably tell you what pitches you tend to talk on.

People with perfect pitch sometimes struggle with a world that does not conform to their sense of pitch.

Musicians with perfect pitch are often either idolized or spurned for having a super-human ability that places them unfairly above others.  It is, however, a blessing and a curse.  Yes, perfect pitch is often very helpful for tuning and sight-reading, provided that standard tuning is used.  It is, however, a curse when a lower tuning is used (such as for baroque music), when the piece is being transposed, or when the ensemble is not in tune.  In fact, the whole mindset of pitch being absolute can get people with perfect pitch into trouble in bands, orchestras and choirs where singing the written pitch does not matter much if it does not harmonize with everyone else.  Today’s perfect pitch (I suppose it was different in earlier eras) operates on the structure of equal temperament, a tuning system that is not entirely natural and is often not used by ensembles. Rather, they typically use the acoustically correct just intonation in which ‘F-sharp’ is slightly higher than ‘G-flat’.  (Ask any professional violinist if they do this.  Don’t ask a singer, they do it without realizing it.)  For someone with perfect pitch, the thought of adjusting a pitch according to its harmonic function likely will not make any sense.  Ironically, many skilled musicians with perfect pitch learn to ignore that ability and instead develop and use relative pitch to achieve the subtle pitch nuances that can make all the difference in a high-quality performance.

How Can I Develop Relative Pitch?

As I stated before, only 1 in 10,000 develop perfect pitch, but almost anyone (including people with perfect pitch) can and should learn relative pitch.  After receiving a reference note (usually the key of the song), a person with relative pitch uses their knowledge and experience of scales and intervals to measure out each note and sing it in tune.  Unlike perfect pitch, relative pitch ability varies widely according to training and practice.  The best way to develop relative pitch is to practice scales, chords and intervals paying close attention to how they sound.  Try them with and without accompaniment (especially if the instrument requires individual note tuning such as the voice or violin) and work on consistency of intonation.  Usually, this kind of ear training is included in any formal instrument or voice study.

For more information on Perfect Pitch aka Absolute Pitch, visit:

• An Overview of Absolute Pitch
• University of California Absolute Pitch Study
• Absolute Pitch – Wikipedia
  

Britten’s Dreams

In creating his definitive piece on the world of sleeping, Britten (though admittedly cryptically) shares with us a number of his own dreams: dreams of adventure on the high seas, dreams of strange and erotic attractions, dreams of terror at the threat of violence, dreams of macabre hauntings, and dreams of happy summer afternoons.  The dream that he shares in the final Shakespeare sonnet, however, is the most cryptic of them all.  Many have claimed that it is merely another declaration of Britten’s love to his lifetime partner Peter Pears, saying that the message is that “the reality offered by a loved one[...]is in fact more real than the nocturnal visions of the ‘real’ world, whether its beauties or  its nightmares.”[1] Mellers found a vague primal and universal truth in this setting, claiming Nocturne “sees dreams as the source of the deepest reality known to us.[...] It is no longer merely the human beloved we are seeking in the blackness of the night; it is also the Beloved, the wellspring of life that mysteriously renews the human spirit.” (181)[2] A universal struggle of humanity would seem to align well with a Mahlerian texture.  However, it does not match well with either Shakespeare’s text or Britten’s setting of it.

The Oxford English Dictionary gives us much insight to understanding the enigmatic phrase “In dreams they look on thee, / And darkly bright are bright in dark directed.”  The dictionary actually uses this very phrase as an example of the definition of “darkly” as “in the dark; in secrecy, secretly,” also including the denotation “with obscure vision; dimly, blindly.”[3] The same dictionary also gives as definitions of “Bright”: “lit up with happiness, gladness, or hope.[...], encouraging,” or “of persons: ‘Resplendent with charms’ (J.); beautiful, fair.”[4] Stringing together these definitions of the time of Shakespeare, we can render “In dreams [my eyes] behold you [my beloved], and in secret rejoicings find hope in your unreal/imagined beauty.”  Shakespeare later affirms “in dead night thy fair, imperfect shade / Through heavy sleep on sightless eyes doth stay!” the phrase Britten chose for the central climax of the entire song cycle.  “Imperfect” of course in Shakespeare’s time usually meant “Wanting some part [...] necessary to the full form or development; not fully formed, [...] deficient.  Wanting some quality or attribute necessary to [...] normal condition, or ideal character; [...] not all that it should be; defective, faulty.”[5] Britten and Shakespeare are describing a person with an ideal of love that they cannot attain, that due to the restrictions of reality they can only claim in secret in a fundamentally faulted way.

Britten is describing himself.  It is known that he frequently struggled in his life with homoerotic feelings that led him through a series of secret unsuccessful amorous encounters^[6] and his moral struggles with his pederastic feelings can be seen in some of his other works such as Peter Grimes.  Such socially unacceptable desires could only be completely addressed (much less fulfilled) in Britten’s dreams and imagination.

Yet, it is the poet’s (and the composer’s) blessing and curse to feel and to dream, to discover and recreate in their own medium “the aërial kisses / Of shapes that haunt thought’s wildernesses.”  In poetry Britten found a voice for the deep agonies and ecstasies of his soul.  In setting poetry he personalized that voice, enhancing the powerful subtlety of literary expression with the further dimensions of musical experience—melodic shape, harmony, rhythm, texture, counterpoint, tonality, register, and so forth; and the motivic use of these elements to carry meaning across songs, works, composers and genres.

By his “adept” use of the medium of the song cycle, Britten recreates for us in Nocturne the “healing” and the “disturbing” aspects of sleep for him. Through his investigation we have discovered both ugly and beautiful, and we have glimpsed at one of Britten’s most profound emotional struggles.  But, as the patron saint of suffering artists knew well, the rest of the world pauses in wonder and admiration at the beauty of such agony:

I beheld on earth angelic grace,
And celestial beauty unmatched in this world,
Such as to rejoice and pain my memories,
Which are so clouded with dreams, shadows, mists.

And I beheld tears in those two bright eyes,
That so many times have put the sun to shame,
And heard, through sighs, words spoken
That moved the mountains and stopped the rivers.

Love, wisdom, excellence, pity and grief
Made in weeping a sweeter concert
Than any other ever heard on earth.

And heaven on that harmony was so intent
That not a leaf upon the bough was seen to stir,
Such sweetness had filled the air and the winds.[7]

Move on to Part 11: Appendix

[2] Wilfrid Mellers, “The Truth of the Dream,” The Britten Companion, 181-191.

[3] “Darkly, adv,” Oxford English Dictionary Online, John Simpson, chief ed, (Oxford UP, 2007), <http://www.oed.com/>.

[4] “Bright, a. and n.,” Oxford English Dictionary Online.

[5] “Imperfect, a. (n.),” Oxford English Dictionary Online.

[6] Cf. Philip Brett, “Britten, Benjamin,” Grove Music Online ed. L. Macy (Accessed Apr. 17, 2007), <http://www.grovemusic.com>, Humphrey Carpender, Benjamin Britten: A Biography.  (New York: Scribner, 1992).

[7] Petrarch, Sonnet 156: “I’ vidi in terra angelici costumi,” translation mine.