Tonic sol-fa

I heard a couple of Julie Feeney songs today. Frankly, they blew me away. She's quite literally awesome. It's a little hard to believe that she's from Galway. She seems to come from another world entirely. Not only is she very easy on the eye she's also outrageously talented.

I'd recommend you listen to her with all due haste. Her first album can be found here on Spotify.

Julie never stops working. She says that she gets a lot of ideas in mid conversation. When this happens she immediately aborts the conversation - no matter who it's with - and jots the words and musical ideas down in tonic sol-fa.

What's tonic sol-fa you may ask.

Why it's a pedagogical technique for teaching sight-singing, invented and popularised by John Curwen who adapted it from a number of earlier musical systems. Some of the roots of tonic sol-fa go way, way back to the olden times.

I had the pleasure of meeting Julie the other day and she told me,

I have caused a new print of note to be made with letter to be joined to every note: whereby thou mayest know how to call every note by his right name, so that with a very little diligence thou mayest more easilie by the viewing of these letters, come to the knowledge of perfect solfeying.

That's what she said. It says so in my notes. She went on to tell me that she had been working on words, in silence, with just her pen and her 'thought-copies' in order to systematically filter everything down into a number of 'prose essays'. I asked her what she meant by this. She told me that each of these 'poems' were essentially a distillation of a different 'thought-streams' from her 'thought copies'. I nodded. She went on to explain how she was then left with a number of 'pots' to distill from. She described those as 'husband and wife' pairings of each 'poem' with their 'spouse-melodies'.

Believe it or not, this woman is a genius. Listen to the music and it all makes sense.