Dalcroze Then and Now: Is Historical Context Important?

I suppose I had taken it for granted that the Dalcroze method was born out of a need for students to have a visceral experience in music in order to play more coherently and expressively, and that this need still exists in our present day conservatories as it had for M. Jacques more than a century ago. I do sense intuitively that the concept and application of exercises are effective, and that their effectiveness would most likely be supported empirically through research. However, in thinking back on what I know of turn-of-the-century music, both from recordings, historical study and plenty of cliche, it strikes me that the world of Emile Jacques-Dalcroze, with all of its strengths and weaknesses, concerns and cultural phenomena, was not the same world we live in today. Perhaps when I was in school, I figured the continuity of the conservatory accross centuries of history as an institution, should measure up pretty close to the conservatory model (and students therein) that Dalcroze would have encountered.

When I listen to old recordings from the early 20th century, the first thing that strikes me about the performances is the difference in taste - the wild rubato, expressive intonation, and a tendency toward expressiveness most modern listeners would find grotesque and undesirable. Conversely, a typical criticism of younger players made by teachers a generation or more older is that the playing is mechanical, inexpressive, "perfect for the sake of perfection" and ultimately missing the point (I remember a lecture by Paul Hersh at San Francisco Conservatory mourning the loss of expressive intonation and the meaningless advancement of technical perfection).

Of course comparing these two situations may be problematic, since the available recordings of generations past are generally of great masters such as Heifetz or Schnabel, who would be thus compared to typical modern conservatory students. It would be wonderful to find a stash of recordings of conservatory auditions in the early 20th century. However, there definitely is a tendency for recordings of professional musicians to sound increasingly more homogeneous, in-tune, and less spontaneous throughout the history of recorded music.

Though this is merely conjecture, I wonder if Dalcroze developed his method for students who would have problems quite different from modern students, who so often need to be "brought out of their shells" or taught to be expressive in an antiseptic modern stylistic vacuum. In the end, I would guess that the Dalcroze method is effective because it reunites the twin human experiences of movement and music (which have recently been proven to utilize more or less the same suite of cognitive functions of the brain), the act of which is effective in fixing any number of different music performance problems. I have to wonder, though, what was he thinking? What was he seeing/hearing, and how did his experiences shape his theories and methods? And how does the difference between the state of music education then and now affect the application of his ideas in today's conservatory?