The Eurhythmics of Jaques-Dalcroze Part 1

The Eurhythmics of Jaques-Dalcroze.

by Emile Jaques-Dalcroze.

"Rhythmische Gymnastik" is the name by which the Dalcroze method is known in Germany, but whether or not the German words are adequate, their literal translation into English certainly gives too narrow an idea of the scope of the system to any one unacquainted with it.

Rhythmical "gymnastics," in the natural meaning of the word, is a part of the Dalcroze training, and a not unimportant part, but it is only one application of a much wider principle; and accordingly, where the term occurs in the following pages, it must be understood simply as denoting a particular mode of physical drill. But for the principle itself and the total method embodying it, another name is needed, and the term "Eurhythmics" has been here coined for the purpose. The originality of the Dalcroze method, the fact that it is a discovery, gives it a right to a name of its own: it is because it is in a sense also the rediscovery of an old secret that a name has been chosen of such plain reference and derivation. Plato, in the words quoted above, has said that the whole of a man's life stands in need of a right rhythm: and it is natural to see some kinship between this Platonic att.i.tude and the claim of Dalcroze that his discovery is not a mere refinement of dancing, nor an improved method of music-teaching, but a principle that must have effect upon every part of life.

JOHN W. HARVEY.

THE EDUCATIONAL SIGNIFICANCE OF h.e.l.lERAU

At h.e.l.lerau two things make an ineffaceable impression upon the mind--the exquisite beauty of movement, of gesture and of grouping seen in the exercises; and the nearness of a great force, fundamental to the arts and expressing itself in the rhythm to which they attain.

Jaques-Dalcroze has re-opened a door which has long been closed. He has rediscovered one of the secrets of Greek education.

A hundred years ago Wilhelm von Humboldt endeavoured to make Greek ideals the paramount influence in the higher schools of Germany. He and a group of friends had long felt indignant at the utilitarianism and shallowness of the work of the schools. In Greek literature, Greek philosophy and Greek art would be found a means of kindling new life in education and of giving it the power of building up strong and independent personalities. When there came to Humboldt the unexpected opportunity of reforming the secondary schools of Prussia, he so remodelled the course of study as to secure for Greek thought and letters a place which, if not central and determinative, would at least bring the elite of the younger generation in some measure under their influence. But his administrative orders failed to impart to the schools the spirit of ancient Greece. To Humboldt and his friends Greek studies had been an inspiration because, apart from their intellectual significance and literary form, those studies had been the channel of an artistic impulse and had been entered into as art. But this artistic power was not felt by the greater number of those who undertook, in obedience to the new regulations, the duty of teaching Greek in the schools. What was left in Greek studies after this failure of artistic insight was often no more than another form of purely intellectual discipline. A new subject had been added to the curriculum, but new life had not been brought into the schools. The very name, Gymnasium, which denoted their h.e.l.lenic purpose, seemed ironical. They were not Greek in spirit and they ignored the training of the body. Thus what Wilhelm von Humboldt had chiefly aimed at accomplishing, he failed to do. It was not the power of Greek art that he brought into the schools but, in most cases, merely the philological study of a second dead language. The cause of his failure was that he had not discovered the educational method which could effectually secure his purpose. He had a.s.sumed that, in order to introduce the Greek spirit into education, it was sufficient to insist upon the linguistic and literary study of Greek.

In time, attempts were made to remedy what was defective in Humboldt's plan by insisting upon physical exercises as an obligatory part of education in the higher schools. But the physical exercises thus introduced, though salutary in themselves, were divorced from the artistic influences of the Greek gymnastic. Humboldt's chief aim had been forgotten. His system of organization had rooted itself, but his educational ideal, to which he attached far greater importance than to administrative regulation, was ignored.

In later years, though such Neo-h.e.l.lenism as Humboldt's had long gone out of fashion, the weakness of the higher schools on the side of artistic training was recognized. But a corrective for this was sought in instruction about art, not (except so far as a little teaching of drawing went) in the practice of an art. An attempt was made to cultivate aesthetic appreciation by lessons which imparted knowledge but did not attempt to train the power of artistic production--an aim which was regarded as unrealizable, except in vocal music, and of course through literary composition, in a secondary school. Thus Humboldt's original purpose has been almost wholly unachieved. The schools, admirably organized on the intellectual side and, within certain limits, increasingly efficient in their physical training, are, as a rule, lacking in the influence of art, as indeed in most cases are the corresponding schools in other countries. The spring of artistic training has not been touched. The divorce between intellectual discipline and artistic influence (except indeed so far as the latter is operative through the study of literature, through a little drawing, and through vocal music) is complete. This defect is felt even more keenly in Germany than in England, because in the German schools the intellectual pressure is more severe, and the schools do less for the cultivation of those interests which lie outside the limits of regular cla.s.s-room work.

Wilhelm von Humboldt gave little direct attention to the work of the elementary schools. His chief concern was with higher education. But in the elementary schools also, except in so far as they gave much care to vocal music, the course of training failed to make use of the educative power of art. A conviction that there is an error has led in Germany, as in England and America, to an increased attention to drawing and to attempts to interest children in good pictures. But there is still (except in the case of vocal music and a little drawing) an unbridged gap between the intellectual and the artistic work of the schools.

Jaques-Dalcroze's experience suggests the possibility of a much closer combination of these two elements, both in elementary and in secondary education. His teaching requires from the pupils a sustained and careful attention, is in short a severe (though not exhausting) intellectual exercise; while at the same time it trains the sense of form and rhythm, the capacity to a.n.a.lyse musical structure, and the power of expressing rhythm through harmonious movement. It is thus a synthesis of educational influence, artistic and intellectual. Its educational value for young children, its applicability to their needs, the pleasure which they take in the exercises, have been conclusively proved. And in the possibility of this widely extended use of the method lies perhaps the chief, though far indeed from the only, educational significance of what is now being done at h.e.l.lerau.

M. E. SADLER.

[Ill.u.s.tration: The College.]

RHYTHM AS A FACTOR IN EDUCATION

FROM THE FRENCH OF E. JAQUES-DALCROZE[1]

[1] First published in _Le Rhythme_ (Bale) of December, 1909.

It is barely a hundred years since music ceased to be an aristocratic art cultivated by a few privileged individuals and became instead a subject of instruction for almost everybody without regard to talent or exceptional ability. Schools of Music, formerly frequented only by born musicians, gifted from birth with unusual powers of perception for sound and rhythm, to-day receive all who are fond of music, however little Nature may have endowed them with the necessary capacity for musical expression and realization. The number of solo players, both pianists and violinists, is constantly increasing, instrumental technique is being developed to an extraordinary degree, but everywhere, too, the question is being asked whether the quality of instrumental players is equal to their quant.i.ty, and whether the acquirement of extraordinary technique is likely to help musical progress when this technique is not joined to musical powers, if not of the first rank, at least normal.

Of ten certificated pianists of to-day, at the most one, if indeed one, is capable of recognizing one key from another, of improvising four bars with character or so as to give pleasure to the listener, of giving expression to a composition without the help of the more or less numerous annotations with which present day composers have to burden their work, of experiencing any feeling whatever when they listen to, or perform, the composition of another. The solo players of older days were without exception complete musicians, able to improvise and compose, artists driven irresistibly towards art by a n.o.ble thirst for aesthetic expression, whereas most young people who devote themselves nowadays to solo playing have the gifts neither of hearing nor of expression, are content to imitate the composer's expression without the power of feeling it, and have no other sensibility than that of the fingers, no other motor faculty than an automatism painfully acquired. Solo playing of the present day has specialized in a finger technique which takes no account of the faculty of mental expression. It is no longer a means, it has become an end.

As a rule, writing is only taught to children who have reached a thinking age, and we do not think of initiating them into the art of elocution until they have got something to say, until their powers of comprehension, a.n.a.lysis and feeling begin to show themselves. All modern educationalists are agreed that the first step in a child's education should be to teach him to know himself, to accustom him to life and to awaken in him sensations, feelings and emotions, before giving him the power of describing them. Likewise, in modern methods of teaching to draw, the pupil is taught to see objects before painting them. In music, unfortunately, the same rule does not hold. Young people are taught to play the compositions of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin and Liszt, before their minds and ears can grasp these works, before they have developed the faculty of being moved by them.

There are two physical agents by means of which we appreciate music.

These two agents are the ear as regards sound, and the whole nervous system as regards rhythm. Experience has shown me that the training of these two agents cannot easily be carried out simultaneously. A child finds it difficult to appreciate at the same time a succession of notes forming a melody and the rhythm which animates them.

Before teaching the relation which exists between sound and movement, it is wise to undertake the independent study of each of these two elements. Tone is evidently secondary, since it has not its origin and model in ourselves, whereas movement is instinctive in man and therefore primary. Therefore I begin the study of music by careful and experimental teaching of movement. This is based in earliest childhood on the automatic exercise of marching, for marching is the natural model of time measure.

By means of various accentuations with the foot, I teach the different time measures. Pauses (of varying lengths) in the marching teach the children to distinguish durations of sound; movements to time with the arms and the head preserve order in the succession of the time measures and a.n.a.lyse the bars and pauses.

All this, no doubt, seems very simple, and so I thought when beginning my experiments. Unfortunately, the latter have shown me that it is not so simple as it seems, but on the contrary very complicated. And this because most children have no instinct for time, for time values, for accentuation, for physical balance; because the motor faculties are not the same in all individuals, and because a number of obstacles impede the exact and rapid physical realization of mental conceptions. One child is always behind the beat when marching, another always ahead; another takes unequal steps, another on the contrary lacks balance. All these faults, if not corrected in the first years, will reappear later in the musical technique of the individual.

Unsteady time when singing or playing, confusion in playing, inability to follow when accompanying, accentuating too roughly or with lack of precision, all these faults have their origin in the child's muscular and nervous control, in lack of co-ordination between the mind which conceives, the brain which orders, the nerve which transmits and the muscle which executes. And still more, the power of phrasing and shading music with feeling depends equally upon the training of the nerve-centres, upon the co-ordination of the muscular system, upon rapid communication between brain and limbs--in a word, upon the health of the whole organism; and it is by trying to discover the individual cause of each musical defect, and to find a means of correcting it, that I have gradually built up my method of eurhythmics.

This method is entirely based upon experiments many times repeated, and not one of the exercises has been adopted until it has been applied under different forms and under different conditions and its usefulness definitely proved. Many people have a completely false idea of my system, and consider it is a simple variant on the methods of physical training at present in fashion, whose inventors have undoubtedly rendered great service to humanity.

I cannot help smiling when I read in certain papers, over names which carry weight, articles in which my method is compared to other gymnastic systems. The fact is, my book is simply a register of the different exercises which I have invented, and says nothing of my ideas in general, for it is written for those who have learnt to interpret my meaning under my personal tuition at Geneva and h.e.l.lerau.

Quite naturally, half the critics who have done me the honour of discussing the book, have only glanced through it and looked at the photographs. Not one of them has undergone the special training upon which I lay stress and without which I deny absolutely that any one has the right to pa.s.s a definite judgment on my meaning; for one does not learn to ride by reading a book on horsemanship, and eurhythmics are above all a matter of personal experience.

The object of the method is, in the first instance, to create by the help of rhythm a rapid and regular current of communication between brain and body; and what differentiates my physical exercises from those of present-day methods of muscular development is that each of them is conceived in the form which can most quickly establish in the brain the image of the movement studied.

It is a question of eliminating in every muscular movement, by the help of will, the untimely intervention of muscles useless for the movement in question, and thus developing attention, consciousness and will-power. Next must be created an automatic technique for all those muscular movements which do not need the help of the consciousness, so that the latter may be reserved for those forms of expression which are purely intelligent. Thanks to the co-ordination of the nerve-centres, to the formation and development of the greatest possible number of motor habits, my method a.s.sures the freest possible play to subconscious expression. The creation in the organism of a rapid and easy means of communication between thought and its means of expression by movements allows the personality free play, giving it character, strength and life to an extraordinary degree.

Neurasthenia is often nothing else than intellectual confusion produced by the inability of the nervous system to obtain from the muscular system regular obedience to the order from the brain. Training the nerve centres, establishing order in the organism, is the only remedy for intellectual perversion produced by lack of will power and by the incomplete subjection of body to mind. Unable to obtain physical realization of its ideas, the brain amuses itself in forming images without hope of realizing them, drops the real for the unreal, and subst.i.tutes vain and vague speculation for the free and healthy union of mind and body.

The first result of a thorough rhythmic training is that the pupil sees clearly in himself what he really is, and obtains from his powers all the advantage possible. This result seems to me one which should attract the attention of all educationalists and a.s.sure to education by and for rhythm an important place in general culture.

But, as an artist, I wish to add, that the second result of this education ought to be to put the completely developed faculties of the individual at the service of art and to give the latter the most subtle and complete of interpreters--the human body. For the body can become a marvellous instrument of beauty and harmony when it vibrates in tune with artistic imagination and collaborates with creative thought. It is not enough that, thanks to special exercises, students of music should have corrected their faults and be no longer in danger of spoiling their musical interpretations by their lack of physical skill and harmonious movements; it is necessary in addition that the music which lives within them--artists will understand me--should obtain free and complete development, and that the rhythms which inspire their personality should enter into intimate communion with those which animate the works to be interpreted.

The education of the nervous system must be of such a nature that the suggested rhythms of a work of art induce in the individual a.n.a.logous vibrations, produce a powerful reaction in him and change naturally into rhythms of expression. In simpler language, the body must become capable of responding to artistic rhythms and of realizing them quite naturally without fear of exaggeration.

This faculty of emotion, indispensable to the artist, was formerly natural to almost all beginners in music, for hardly any but pre-destined artists devoted themselves to the art; but, if this is no longer the case, it is possible at least to awaken dulled faculties, to develop and co-ordinate them, and it is the duty of every musical educationalist to deter from instrumental technique every individual who is still without musical feeling.

The experimental study of rhythm should form a part of every well-organized musical education, and this study will be useful not only to musicians, but to music itself. It is quite certain that, if since Beethoven's time harmony has developed, if each generation has created fresh groupings of sounds, it is not the same regarding rhythmic forms, which remain much as they were.

I shall be told that the means of expression are of no importance so long as the artist is able to show his meaning, that a sincere emotion can be clearly expressed even with old-fashioned rhythms, and that to try and create new rhythms is mere technical work, and to enforce such upon the composers of to-morrow is simply depriving them of their character. This is all true, and I myself have a horror of seeking new means of expression within the limits of hard and fast rules, for expression ought to be a spontaneous manifestation. But I a.s.sert that experiments in rhythm, and the complete study of movements simple and combined, ought to create a fresh mentality, that artists thus trained will find inevitably and spontaneously new rhythmic forms to express their feelings, and that in consequence their characters will be able to develop more completely and with greater strength. It is a fact that very young children taught by my method invent quite naturally physical rhythms such as would have occurred to very few professional musicians, and that my most advanced pupils find monotonous many contemporary works the rhythmic poverty of which shocks neither public nor critics.

I will terminate this short sketch of my system by pointing out the intimate relations which exist between movements in time and movements in s.p.a.ce, between rhythms in sound and rhythm in the body, between Music and Plastic Expression.

Gestures and att.i.tudes of the body complete, animate and enliven any rhythmic music written simply and naturally without special regard to tone, and, just as in painting there exist side by side a school of the nude and a school of landscape, so in music there may be developed, side by side, plastic music and music pure and simple. In the school of landscape painting emotion is created entirely by combinations of moving light and by the rhythms thus caused. In the school of the nude, which pictures the many shades of expression of the human body, the artist tries to show the human soul as expressed by physical forms, enlivened by the emotions of the moment, and at the same time the characteristics suitable to the individual and his race, such as they appear through momentary physical modifications.

In the same way, plastic music will picture human feelings expressed by gesture and will model its sound forms on those of rhythms derived directly from expressive movements of the human body.

To compose the music which the Greeks appear to have realized, and for which Goethe and Schiller hoped, musicians must have acquired experience of physical movements; this, however, is certainly not the case to-day, for music has become beyond all others an intellectual art. While awaiting this transformation, present generations can apply education by and for rhythm to the interpretation of plastic stage music such as Richard Wagner has imagined. At the present day this music is not interpreted at all, for dramatic singers, stage managers and conductors do not understand the relation existing between gesture and music, and the absolute ignorance regarding plastic expression which characterizes the lyric actors of our day is a real profanation of scenic musical art.

Not only are singers allowed to walk and gesticulate on the stage without paying any attention to the time, but also no shade of expression, dynamic or motor, of the orchestra--crescendo, decrescendo, accelerando, rallentando--finds in their gestures adequate realization.

By this I mean the kind of wholly instinctive transformation of sound movements into bodily movements such as my method teaches.

Authors, poets, musicians and painters cannot demand from the interpreters of their works knowledge of the relations between movements in time and in s.p.a.ce, for this knowledge can only be developed by special studies. No doubt a few poets and painters have an inborn knowledge of the rhythms of s.p.a.ce; for instance, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, the stage mounter of "Electra" at the Vienna Opera, who constructed a huge staircase, on which, however, the actors, having little acquaintance with the most elementary notions of balance, moved with deplorable heaviness; or again, the aesthetician Adolphe Appia, whose remarkable work _Music and Stage Mounting_ ought to be the guide of all stage managers. But the majority of composers write their plastic music without knowing whether it is capable of being practically realized, without personal experience of the laws of weight, force and bodily movement.

My hope is, that sincere artists desirous of perfection and seeking progress will study seriously the grave question which I raise. For my own part, relying on many experiments, and full of confidence in ideas carefully thought out, I have devoted my life to the teaching of rhythm, being fully satisfied that, thanks to it, man will regain his natural powers of expression, and at the same time his full motor faculties, and that art has everything to hope from new generations brought up in the cult of harmony, of physical and mental health, of order, beauty and truth.