Happy Monday everyone,
Thank you for subscribing to Wu Fei’s Music Daily. This is episode #432 — Si la re mi 老电话.
This composition was created yesterday on multitrack guzheng, performed by me. I used four pitches as the motif for the entire piece. They are singing pitches: si la re mi in solfège. Solfège is a music education method used to teach aural skills, pitch and sight-reading of Western notation music. Singing solfège has been in music education in China since my parents were in elementary school. It has been widely taught in public schools for nearly a century.
When I was in middle-high school, telephones became popular in China. Memorizing phone numbers became a new phenomenon. My classmates at China Conservatory of Music and I found an easy way to remember all our professors’ phone numbers by turning all the numbers into solfège singing pitches. It was much quicker to associate the numbers with melodies than the actual numbers. “Si la re mi” were the last four digits of my composition professor Dr. Gao’s phone number. I still use this method today to memorize numbers, and sometimes passwords.
Hope you all are starting a fantastic week!
Wu Fei 吴非
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