‘By means of various accentuations with the foot, I teach the different time measures. Pauses (of various length) in the marching teach the children to distinguish duration of sound; movements to time with the arms and the head preserve order in the succession of the time measures and analyze the bars and pauses.
‘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 coördination 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 coördination 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.
‘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 unless 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 coördination of the nerve-centres, to the formation and development of the greatest possible number of motor habits, my method assures the freest possible play to subconscious expression.
‘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. * * * 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 analogous 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.
‘Gestures and attitudes 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 the 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 the race, such as they appear through momentary physical modifications.
‘At the present day plastic stage 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, ralletando—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.’
II
This is briefly the essential part of the Jacques-Dalcroze school of Eurhythmics. The method falls into three main divisions: (1) ear training; (2) rhythmic gymnastics; and (3) improvisations. The ear method is nothing but the training of the pupil in an accurate sense of pitch and a grasp of tonality. However, the system of teaching rhythmic gymnastics is based upon two different methods: time and time-values. Time is expressed by movements of the arms; time-values—note durations—by movements of the feet and body. A combination of these two methods is called the plastic counterpoint, in which the actual notes played are represented by movements of the arms, while the counterpoint in crotchets, quavers or semi-quavers, is given by the feet. The crotchet as the unit of note-values is expressed by means of a step. Thus for each note in the music there is one step. Notes of shorter duration than the crotchet are also expressed by steps, only they are quicker in proportion to their frequency. ‘When the movements corresponding to the notes from the crotchet to the whole note of twelve beats have, with all their details, become a habit, the pupil need only make them mentally, contenting himself with one step forward. This step will have the exact length of the whole note, which will be mentally analyzed into its various elements. Although these elements are not individually performed by the body, their images and the innervations suggested by these images take the place of the movements.’
The first training of a pupil in the Dalcroze school consists of steps only. Simple music is played to which the pupils march. After the pupil has an elementary command of his legs the rhythmic training of his arms and body begins. At this stage the simple movements to indicate rhythms and notes are made a second nature of the pupil. This can be compared to the pupil’s learning of the alphabet. Plastic reading consists of composing more or less definite images from the elementary rhythm-units. This is done either individually or in groups. The pupil is taught to form clear mental images of the movements corresponding to the rhythm in question and then give physical expression to those images. As a child learns to compose letters and syllables to words and words to phrases, a Dalcroze pupil is taught to understand the elementary parts of the music and the rules of its composition and to recompose it into a lengthy series of body movements.