I got my iPod back out this weekend…

What ever happened to this?  Have a listen to Ani’s wisdom:

Paradigm – Ani DiFranco

Solfa (Solfège)

In a previous post, I described the system of music notation that the church choir uses.  I’ve now taken photos of a very interesting manuscript:  Handel’s Messiah, in its entirety, transcribed in solfege (what they call solfa).  I paged through it a bit, and all of the recitatives at the beginnings of movements are just long strings of letters.  I took a photo of a fugue-like section where each vocal part enters a few measures after the last.

Without already knowing the piece a bit, I think it’d be a bit difficult to get all of the rhythms right, especially during melismatic coloratura type sections…

(the line of letters without words underneath it would be a melisma)

Of course, it isn’t really a full score, as it’s only vocal.  Instruments would read from a normal score.  In general the choir has a good sense of pitch, and can read well.  I can’t help but wonder if it’s due in part to the fact that they’ve been using movable do solfege as their sole way of reading music.  Although, I really think that the combination of solfege and our normal notation is the best – it provides a visual as well as words for each note.

Church choir fun

Since I got back on Friday night, that left Saturday free for me to go to choir rehearsal with Nani (instead of waiting for next week). We walked down together, and the rehearsal was at someone’s house right near where I work. It was just in his living room, and there were about 20 people there, almost none of whose names I remember. Nani had warned me that the music they read is solfa instead of solfege, so I wasn’t sure if I’d do too well. Turns out, solfa is Malagasy French for English solfege, and Malagasy French solfege means the 5 lined staff that most of us are used to reading. I’ll have to take a picture at some point, but a line of their music will have 4 lines (soprano, alto, tenor, bass) that each have letters on them, with words underneath everything. A line will look like this :
S s | d m s| l. s m| r d _| etc
There are whole hymnals full of it in the church! I’m going to see if I can get ahold of one to bring home.

It’s just like ear training class ! Just the do re mi scale with only first letters. A dot means it’s held longer but the next note is shorter, a dash means the note is carried until the dot ends. The vertical lines are measures. So, we can 100% speak the same language even though I don’t understand much of what the director is saying ! It was like feeling instantly comfortable and fitting in. The choir is going to Mananjary to give some concerts in a few weeks, and I think I’m invited. It’d be leaving on a Thursday, so I don’t know if I can really leave, but it’s nice that they want to include me.

On Sunday, I went to church and sang with them there too. The choir is actually really good – they all sing out, but still blend pretty well, and have a great sense of pitch. The girl I sit by, Lydia, has an awesome voice – very powerful. On Sunday afternoon most of the choir members were getting together to make koba, so they invited me along for that too. Koba (pronounced koo-bah) is a banana/rice kind of dessert wrapped in banana leaves. First, you hold the banana leaves over coals to melt them a little and make them pliable.

Then, you make the rice flour. Yes, make it. A picture explains better :

Once the rice is pounded, we sift it, and keep doing so till everything has been crushed.

Meanwhile, inside others were making a mixture of bananas, rice flour, and sugar. You slop a little of the banana mixture on a banana leaf, sprinkle some crushed peanuts on top of it, and fold the banana leaf around it.

After that it gets cooked. Double boiled maybe ? We left before it got to that point. Almost all of the conversation was in Malagasy, but a lot of people asked me things in French. Yanitra, the woman whose house it was at invited me over on Wednesday night for dinner/prayers I think. One of the guys crushing the rice, Nar, kept saying, ‘Ça va, Callista ?’, because it was about all he knew in French. He seemed to make people laugh a lot.

Anyway, all in all I think that this church choir connection is going to provide some lovely opportunites to get to know people, and Nani said that they often sing classical music too, so before I leave we should be doing some Mozart or Handel.

In other Malagasy social news, I really like living below Sophie and Zoë. They invited me up for lunch on Sunday again, and Sophie said she’d like to pretty much plan on that every weekend that we’re all there. They are really sweet girls, and it’s nice to have people my age living here too.

Also, I got some peanut butter from the Peace Corps house. They commission someone to make it, and the proceeds go to put a poor girl through college or something benevolent like that.