Beruflich Dokumente
Kultur Dokumente
Jaques-Dalcroze's eurhythmics is entitled to a special place in the field of music. It is now and always
has been, in the course of a development that started long ago. And also it belongs to the various
branches of music it deals with.
But it is also fundamentally, situated in the field of corporal movement or, to use a simpler word in its
wider meaning, it deals with gestures.
That this should be so is not altogether unexpected. Music and movement, though not identical, often
overlap. Where this happens there is a vast common ground, and it is rhythm: not just any rhythm but
that inspired by music and which is artistic and human at the same time.
Often we have action coupled with words but here we combine action with music. In both cases a
silent gesture enhances the value of audible expression. A movement confirms the message of the
music and vice versa. Each is in conformity with the other.
This togetherness of bodily and musical movement, this embodiment of the music has always been
called dancing. There are indeed many ways to realize this notion of dancing. We shall merely
mention two or three here.
Popular dances are first meant to please those who perfom them, which does not mean that they
should not be appreciated by those who watch. Conversely, when a dancer performs on the stage he
has essentially the pleasure of his audience in mind. But why should he not enjoy himself as well ? In
a way a conductor also embodies the music with his gestures. They represent a sort of dance
intended for the musicians facing him. The conductor proposes a frame within which the musicians
play: that's his metronymic task; but he also makes the music alive through his personal beat, he
makes it progress, he mimics stress and expression; and thus measure becomes rhythm. What he is
performing alone on the desk is music without the sound, it is the rhythm of this music that the
orchestra reproduces accordingly.
What makes these three aspects of dancing different is therefore their basic purpose. Similarly we can
now define eurhythmics.
No doubt eurhythmics is akin to dancing as we have defined it here: both combine movement and
music. But this symbiosis existed before eurhythmics, it is not here that original ground bas been
covered. What makes eurhythmics unique is that the combination of movement and music
systematically serves educational purposes. It is a means to an end, it makes it possible to explore the
vast territories encompassed by this movement and this music.
What is this education for ? What faculties will the pupils develop and train ? In order to answer these
questions we must distinguish between two aspects of progress which, to all intents and purposes, are
so closely linked that they happen together.
Education for music. The pupil develops a submission to the music he hears. This voice coming
from without sings within and provokes his movements. Listening becomes intense, accurate. He is
going to feel, to identify the length of a note, its pitch, the phrasing, the various shades of expression,
the forms. The road that leads to solfège, interpretation, musical background, inventiveness is wide
open.
http://www.dalcroze.ch/
***Institut Jaques-Dalcroze Genève***
Education through music. General faculties are trained and they would make a long list: spontaneity
and reflexion, self-awareness and -control, accuracy, memory, awareness of time, space, speed and
energy; timing, balance, imagination, camaraderie, and a pervasive feeling for beauty and truth.
There is no point in declaring this list closed, far from it.
Eurhythmics cannot be likened to a tree whose growth has stopped. What matters is that the progress
made should last a lifetime and that this type of musical education should reconcile, to quote Jaques-
Dalcroze, the corporal and intellectual faculties of the person.
We have seen that in "eurhythmics" the word rhythm is taken in its most noble acceptation. It is not so
much the parts of the movement that are considered, as its unity seen as a whole. It includes balance,
coherence, vitality, and the very meaning of music, and we hope to find these same qualities in our
own personal life. Music becomes a guide-line, a means to harmonize the stuff we are made of.
Jaques-Dalcroze, a poet and a musician,was indeed not what universities would call a philosopher. He
was an artist in the first place. But there is a wisdom to be found in all his work, a great insight, that
made itself felt in his teaching. He knew that in giving, prominence to sensation and motivity, emotion,
self-knowledge, self-scrutiny, he would offer a true idea of man to a society that greatly needed it, and
still does nowadays. Also, for a society to keep its cohesion, it is imperative that man should not walk
alone but open up to a world we all share, and this is something we can all do. Such an attitude is best
expressed by Dalcroze the poet in his famous song:
It's so simple to love
To smile at life
To let the charm work
When we feel so inclined
To open up a window in our hearts
To let the sun invade it
And bring out the goodness in us
Eurhythmics does not aim at specialization. It is therefore right to say that it consists in basic training.
But it would be wrong to consider only the foundation ! The target is a lofty one and we keep being
drawn to it: through eurhythmics we achieve our personal qualities.
Modem education insists, and rightly so, on basic skills. On the other hand, aims are less easily
defined. When they stop serving a useful purpose, we are left to our own devices and, under the mask
of tolerance, education hides its doubts, its aimlessness or its indifference.
Now, like everything that rises above this ground, education gets its identity from the top. Our Mont-
Blanc has indeed a massive foundation but it is when we look at the summit that we realize how much
it deserves its name; without its immaculate crown it would be plain Gris-Mont, one among many
others.
Similarly Salisbury Cathedral is not identified by its foundations, solid though they may be, but by its
spire, its final achievement. Of course, in the building sequence, the foundations came first, the spire
last. But where the prestige of the monument is concerned the opposite is true. They very essence of
the cathedral is heralded by its spire. This admirable landmark dominates and justifies all the rest.
Basically eurhythmics may not be very different from other learner-based methods, and those
excellent principles, that were Dalcroze's own, such as the precedence of bodily movement over
acquisition by pure intellectual means were good enought 80 years ago to have survived up to now
and to have become the common good, and not a bad thing either. Yet, and this is this specificity,
eurhythmics, in all the experiments it offers, contains a spiritual value that may not always be felt as
http://www.dalcroze.ch/
***Institut Jaques-Dalcroze Genève***
one exercises it but is foremost in the hierarchy of values. We keep both feet on the ground (in a
manner of speaking) but the head is in the skies. Let us illustrate this with an example.
Marching in rhythm is a basic exercise to foster awareness of-well, rhythm, and it can be varied
endlessly in time, touch, force, contrast. It should be constantly exercised and later, it will constitute a
basis for the understanding of the most varied rhythmical patterns. Now should the mind concentrate
on this march ? Should a rambler think of his feet ? The answer is of course no. This is only a transient
basis, meant for something else.
A rambler has his mind on the river which is irradiated by the invading sun that brings out the
goodness in us, on the lofty trees that filter its light and bend over the water. He is drawn towards
these pictures which change as he progresses and give his peregrination both meaning and poetic
charm. Similarly a pupil does not think of his steps and of the ground he treads but he is attracted by
the music into which he penetrates. The pulsation he chooses is but one element, essential though
modest, of the beauty of the tune. The music is all there, it hovers on our movements and keeps our
heads up. At this juncture the responsibility of the teacher is invaluable, but not more than the
beneficial influence of the spiritual contents and the joy of the music.
It will therefore be understood that eurhythmics is not only concerned with the study of rhythm. It
encompasses music in its entirety, by means of a corporal investment that embodies its movements.
Were this not the case our exercise would resemble a Gris-Mont or a cathedral whose construction
would have been stopped at pavement level.
Contents
What goes on during a lesson ? Let us visualise it with the image of a staircase : the steps represent
the elements that can occur in a lesson, although they will never all be present at the same time.
The continous arrows show that one activity has not been relinquished when the next one is initiated :
the lesson is indeed building up. The nether elements must be present and real enough to support the
edifice, the danger being that steps 7 or 8 may prove a stumbling-block if steps 1 and 2 are not
permanently resumed and reactivated.
There are certainly différences between a class of grown-ups and one of children but both can
progress in the same way.
http://www.dalcroze.ch/
***Institut Jaques-Dalcroze Genève***
We have given a picture of a eurhythmics lesson which is a best schematic. Concretely things are not
so rigidly planned; several themes can be developed with flexibility and liveliness and mirror one
another, thus ensuring that they are all understood. Written information is all very well but preference
should be given to attending or taking part in a well-conducted lesson. However, having, ventured so
far, we shall have to answer the question on the right of our diagram. What does the completion of all
these lines amount to ?
http://www.dalcroze.ch/
***Institut Jaques-Dalcroze Genève***
To no less than the joint study of the natural rhythms of the body and the artistic rhythms of music.
This happy expression is taken from a curriculum in which Jaques-Dalcroze recalled the contents of
eurhythmics.
Summing up
Jaques-Dalcroze's main intuitions and his programme, already based on experience, were fixed in his
mind about as early as 1900. When he died in 1950, his disciples carried on his educational work in
the spirit of the master. His teaching has been handed over to us in the same way and this will
continue in the future. Jaques-Dalcroze's method is not written law, it can better be described as
tradition, as common law. Having inherited a collection of precedents, of tested procedures and of
some firm convictions, each new proponent of the method must reinvent it, in the same sense as we
say Colombus invented America when he thought he had discovered it. This tradition is very much
alive and is given its strength by the personal effort required of the newcomer who must contribute to
and share the responsibility of the conduct of the ship. But then he can choose his route freely, if he
avoids the snares of fashion and time and keeps enough leeway. This tradition however has its liability
: there is a risk of alteration, of disfigurement, of principes being neglected; in short, it may lose its
identity.
Eurhythmics is a musical education, which is a twin notion. A vehicle may lose one wheel and then go
awry. That is also true for eurhythmics. If education is lost sight of, its proponents may think they have
found a new art, a tenth Muse. They will be tempted to attach a paramount importance to the
performance of the person and neglect his or her progress. If music is forgotten, they may claim to
have found a new philosophy. Rhythm is not the attribute only of music, it belongs to the whole world.
Everything is rhythm, from the atom to the nebulae, it comprises everything terrestrial and human.
Conceiving life and the world as rhythm is a noble thought but so encompassing that it becomes
impossible to see what good it could do to education. It is true that our movements are inherently
rhythmical and this could benefit education; but if this notion is approached without taking into
consideration the artistic rhythm of music, and anyone is free to do so, then we are dealing with
another school of thought. Indeed, everyone is free to choose his field of activity and his purpose; and
everyone may alter course. The proponents of the Dalcroze method do not live on an island and they
like to have around them people, often friends at that, who follow other paths. But they also like to call
these paths by another name.
It is therefore essential, in an atmospere of freedom without which the method could not breathe, to
state the criteria of an indispensable orthodoxy, proper to any human endeavour that wants to keep
and deserve its name. And it is apposite that the Institut Jaques-Dalcroze, which is entrusted with its
founder's heritage and is also the center of its world-wide expansion, should take the matter in hand,
with the sole view of general enlightenment.<7td>
http://www.dalcroze.ch/
***Institut Jaques-Dalcroze Genève***
3. Finally, all this preparation after which we can call music our mother tongue also bestows on us the
marvellous faculty of anticipation. In sound as in movement the pupil, as it turns out, will be able to
follow his own path. This faculty, which small children possess, is later checked by acquired concepts
and conventions. The Dalcrozian education fosters and shapes it, as it considers it as a source of
control and maturity, but also as a means of teaching; it goes as far as making it an essential element
of the method. Such is the place given to i>improvisation, where movement and thought precede the
music.
We have named our third principle.
On the strength of these three notions eurhythmics can claim to be ever modern. It is tied to no
trendysh musical or choregraphic style. With an everlasting smile, it changes with each generation. It
thrives on invention. I does not create new needs, it provides answers to permanent requirements. It
does not claim to change man, merely to respect him. Humanism here is not trumpeted as a theory
but implied as an affectionate intent. And eurhythmics finds the foundation of this humanism in one or
two unarguable facts : ... that they will not twist necks to suit clean collars and hack feet to fit new
boots... that the body is more than the raiment; that the Sabbath was made for man; that all institutions
shall be judged and damned by whether they have fitted the normal flesh and spirit.(Chesterton, What's
wrong with the World.)
January 1989
Dominique Porte
http://www.dalcroze.ch/