The Eurhythmics of Jaques-Dalcroze

by Émile Jaques-Dalcroze

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, analysis 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 analyse 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 Hellerau.

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 pass 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.