sorry my mistake but it was 17 years ago lol i have no idea why i find it so funny, probably the image of swimming cows!!

I like to sing, alone or in a group. I thought it would be pleasurable to join the choir, but did not enjoy my first rehearsal about a year and a half ago and did not return for a second.  It was late and they were very boisterous and chatty, and I just wasn't in the mood for it.  shrug.  I think a smaller group more interested in singing than socializing is a better fit for me.

I really think we need to get away from the hand-me-down practice of teaching beginners to rhyme off mnemonics for the 5 lines and 4 spaces.

Why?

Because that method does not relate to stepwise movement ie adjacent notes of a scale.  If you take the 5 lines (E G B D F) and the 4 spaces (F A C E) as your reading method and find yourself trying to read scalic patterns, which are melodically very common, then you are faced with the problem that alternate notes are interleaved between the 2 mnemonics.  It's an unnecessarily complicated means of arriving just at the letter name of the note and you still don't know what it sounds like in relation to the previous note. I call that procedurally inefficient!

I even maintain that we should not be teaching beginners to read musical pitch from a 5-line stave.

Why?

Because we need to get back to the principles behind the representation of pitch on the stave.  I'm referring to the principles of:
(a) Direction of movement, and
(b) Distance of movement.

By direction of movement, I mean is the second of two notes higher than, lower than or the same pitch as the first note?  A one-line stave can (and I believe, should) be used to teach that concept.  Try the following: rule a single line on a page.  Draw some sort of blob on the line ie the line runs through the middle of the blob. Now draw a series of blobs, some on the line, some completely above the line and some completely below the line.  Keep changing the pattern between repeated notes and steps in either direction. Include the occasional movement of two steps at a time ie between the upper and lower spaces, skipping the line.  Now sing any note, whatever sounds and feels like a comfortable note for you.  Treat that note as the note on the line.  Try singing what you have written by alternating between that note and any higher and lower notes.  Never mind whether the higher and lower notes stay the same or not as long as the note on the line stays the same. The exercise is about direction of movement independently of distance but this involves the recognition of and ability to return to a constant reference point.

By distance of movement (which should presuppose recognition of direction), I mean differentiating between smaller and larger pitch changes in either direction. These smaller and larger distances of movement are known as intervals and their distances or sizes are loosely measurable by numbers.  Take a scale on a piano and play up and down one octave, singing along to the notes.  Sing the notes to the numbers 1-8, where 1 is the bottom note. Supposing hypothetically that you are playing a C major scale, the alloaction of numbers to notes would be as follows:
CDEFGABcBAGFEDC = 123456787654321

After singing the above sequence of numbered notes several times, lets alternate between 1 and each of the other notes in turn:

CDCECFCGCACBCcCBCACGCFCECDC = 121314151617181716151413121

When that is second nature, try it from the top note down:

cBcAcGcFcEcDcCcDcEcFcGcAcBc = 878685848382818283848586878

Now try working through bell-like permutations of the order of the notes in the scale eg

cAFDBGEC = 86427531

cGBFADEC = 85746231

cFBEADGC = 84736251

The object is to develop the concept of thinking within the environment of a key, where each note has a spacial relationship to the others but primarily with the reference point of the key note (1 and 8).

Intervals are known by ordinal numbers eg the distances from note 1 to each of the others are known respectively as seconds, thirds, fourths, fifths, sixths, sevenths and octaves.

Intervals are measurable from any note and not just the key note eg seconds include 1-2 (C-D), 2-3 (D-E), 3-4 (E-F), 4-5 (F-G), 5-6 (G-A), 6-7 (A-B), 7-8 (B-C)

Try working through the thirds, fourths, fifths, sixths, sevenths and octaves from each note of the C major scale.  This will involve crossing into a second octave.

I don't believe in the teaching of intervals primarily by tune association.  I think just about every music teacher I ever had for aural tests did that and it seemed as stupid to me as a 12-year-old schoolboy as it does now. At least the teacher dealing with this for my first instrumental grade exam happened to explain, almost in passing, that the numbers came from counting up the notes of the scale.  Why did she have to complicate matters by throwing in tune associations as a so-called memory aid?  By all means identify intervals in tunes, having learnt the intervals from note-counting but there is no logic to the reverse!  It merely adds an extra layer of things to be memorized.  Counting up the scale addresses relative pitch logically.

Apart from my early explanation of direction of movement, where I suggested reading and writing from a one-line stave, I have so far not dealt with the written musical note.  How, then, does that relate to sight-singing?

The answer is that I believe that musical literacy needs to follow behind aural development, just as with literacy in language.  I believe in the bottom-up principle of synthetic phonics in learning to read and write words, and I believe in a similar principle for musical literacy.  Having established the eye-ear-larynx coordination for direction of movement from a one-line stave and then the worked through the intervals without reading, lets build up the reading skills by adding lines to the stave, one at a time.

First, return to the one-line stave but treat it differently than before; this time, add the concept of distance which was previously omitted.  This means that the spaces above and below the line are no longer free-pitched; they are a second above and below the note on the line.

Draw a two-line stave.  This will allow notes of five pitches.  Draw a series of notes to include lots of permutations of note order plus occasional repeated notes.  Practise singing what you have written, checking it on a piano.

Expand the procedure above to three-line staves (seven pitches) and four-line staves (nine pitches)

When it's time to move up to the now-standard five-line stave, revise the whole procedure of learning intervals and note-order permutations but this time writing it out on the stave and singing as you write.  This is still not proper sight-singing but it is about building up the eye-ear-larynx coordination as background preparation for future sight-singing practice.

Now, returning to my initial comment that we need to get away from the hand-me-down practice of teaching beginners to rhyme off mnemonics for the 5 lines and 4 spaces, I'll now say that there is a time and place for that practice later on.  The point is that learning the names of the notes on lines and spaces separately relates to chord construction.  That is too complex to be appropriate for the early stages of learning to read musical pitch.

Thank you for the lesson

Thank you for the lesson

Thanks! I always had some degree of coordination difficulties in music which I would now see as being explained by dyslexia, dyspraxia and AS but didn't know of those possible explanations as a student or even when I was doing a lot of instrumental tuition in the 1990s.  However, I found myself developing an approach to teaching that was based upon the analysis of my own difficulties, evaluating where my own teachers were right and wrong and working out what I thought was more sensible.  Wherever there was a concept or technique that had been too much, too late, I would try to sow the seeds of it in a simplified way at a much earlier stage.  Most of it owed a lot more to synthetic phonics in English than to any of my music lessons.

What, not Also Spracht Zarathustra?

Surely, that's a minor seventh.

I've been scratching my head trying to come up with something for a Maj. 7th, and the only thing that comes to mind is "Maria" from West Side Story...and that might have actually been a Dim. 5th.

Also Sprach Zarathustra. You'll have to forgive me - back when I learnt the intervals by rote I was more familiar with the CoF theme than ASZ (even though I hadn't seen the film, but I remember it being played a lot at the LA Olympics).

Hey, there's no edit here.  That's my excuse and I'm stickin' to it.

Nothing wrong with Vangelis.

There was a deodorant ad in the U.S. that served much the same purpose (Beeeeeeeeeee-Ohhhhhhhhhh).