SIGHT-SINGING. The statement has often been made that in Tudor times ability to sing at sight was regarded as an ac complishment which should be possessed by every educated per son. To what extent this ideal was actually realized is no doubt another matter—certainly it must have been confined to a com paratively small section of society and must have been still further limited by the scarcity of printed music. The people no doubt sang their folk songs, but these were acquired by ear.
About the middle of the last century, John Hullah (q.v.), an English musician seeking a method of singing from notation, turned to the Continent for inspiration, and established in Great Britain a system of teaching sight-singing, based on the principle of a fixed tonic. About the same time, John Curwen, an English Non-conformist minister, developing a method of teaching and training devised by a Miss Glover, evolved what is known as the tonic sol-fa system. This system employed not a fixed but a movable tonic, and for a time controversy ran high between the rival schools. The fixed-doh method had, however, one serious
weakness, for it pre-supposed on the part of the singer a sense of absolute pitch, which is possessed by very few, and the system of a movable tonic, with its strong appeal to the perception of rela tive pitch, which can be cultivated in all save the aurally defec tive, has consequently almost completely superseded, at all events throughout the English-speaking world, the older method.
On the continent of Europe sight-singing instruction is still mostly based on a fixed tonic, though considerable attention has been given in France to a method evolved by Cheve (185o), which is based on a movable tonic, and which uses numbers in stead of names for the degrees of the scale. In the United States the general method of teaching sight-singing is that based on a direct application of a movable tonic to staff notation.