I. Msr. Jacques, Brain Scans and Me (and You)

This is the first chapter of my dissertation, dealing with the work of Emile Jacques-Dalcroze, other pedagogues and more recent developments in our understanding of human cognition and music/time experience.

The importance of Emile Jacques-Dalcroze in understanding rhythm and musicality is threefold. First and most personally, his method figured prominently in my own formative music education while at Carnegie Mellon University. Second, his legacy has directly affected the course of music education in Europe and America throughout the 20th century, with many institutions offering courses in Dalcroze-Eurhythmics by certified instructors. Third, his visionary intuitive approach to connecting music with physical movement was conceived precisely during the major upheaval of "Western" musical assumptions at the dawn of the 20th century and provided a framework for education of the musical human body and mind that would persist throughout the tumultuous century and prove remarkably consistant with empiracally verified, biologically sound discoveries by present day scientists.

Emile Jacques-Dalcroze, born in 1865, was a Swiss composer and pedagogue, with a background in mime performance as well. As an educator early in his career, he took note of the movements of his more sucessful students and derived the basis of his theory that music must be learned experientially, and that the locomotor activities of the human body are inseparable from the natural and unburdened expression of musical gesture. Founding a school in Hellerau in 1910, Dalcroze had already publicly articulated his method of music education, including training in Solfege (which for Dalcroze uses a somewhat different approach to the already institutionalized French system), Eurhyhtmics and Imrovisation. The primary text written by Emile Jacques-Dalcroze consists of a series of articles composed between the years of 1898 and 1919, published in a single volume entitled "Rhythm, Music and Education." Most refered to among present day Eurhythmics teachers is the 6th chapter, "Rhythmic Movement, Solfege, and Improvisation" in which he gives the most specific guidlines for exercises and curriculum. In general, certified teachers cite the experiential neccessity of the program as reaason for the lack of formal standardized curriculum or "lesson plans" as such standardization would allow uninitiated to believe the program was more mechanical than it is. One rather useful compilation of Dalcroze's ideas is presented in Stephen Moore's doctoral dissertation in which he expounds on the somewhat unstructured documents by the founder and explains in detail how the method works, drawing from nearly a century of practical application of the method by generations of instructors. Moore holds a Liscence certificate from the American Dalcroze association and is himself a seasoned teacher. Several other teachers both in Europe and America have written various texts expounding on the ideas of Dalcroze. There is no "Bible" of Dalcroze method, however, and likely will not be. There is also journal regularly published though, and the certification process for teachers is relatively rigorous.


Although the most perscriptive explaination of Eurhythmics pedagogy is given in "Rhythm, Movement and Education," Dalcroze reveals some of his most fundamental assertions about the nature of rhythm, movement and the human faculty for music in the chapter entitled "The Initiation into Rhythm." Sumarizing his own observations, he produces the following list of conclusions, which I quote from the article:

1. Rhythm is movement.
2. Rhythm is essentially physical.
3. Every movement involves time and space.
4. Musical consciousness is the result of physical experience.
5. The perfecting of physical resources results in clarity of perception.
6. The perfecting of movements in time assures consciousness of musical rhythm.
7. The perfecting of movements in space assures consciousness of plastic rhythm.
8. The perfecting of movements in time and space can only be accomplished by exercises in rhythmic movement. (Dalcroze, 83-84)

From this summary Dalcroze reveals both his intuitive sense of the neurological reality of the human brain that links music with movement as well as the foundation of his principles of education. We can also see from these observations how rhythm figures into a somewhat circular process of learning musicality, that by means of the synonymity of physical movement with rhythm, outwardly practiced movement can be used to enhance both perception and production of music.

As i mentioned before, the timing of Jacques-Dalcroze's study of the fundamentals of musicality and subsequent formation of a pedagogical method could hardly have been more timely. Not only was the turning of the 20th century an important time of transition for classical music and a period of great and far-reaching technological developments, it was also a time of great activity in the early field of Psychology, Sigmund Freud having published his Interpretation of Dreams in 1899, innitiating more than a century of continuity in the discipline. Charles Darwin was dead only a few years, having published his Origin of Species in 1859 and The Expressions of Emotions in Man and Animals in 1872. These works, concurrent with European music's act of undoing itself and Dalcroze's remarkable observations are cornerstones in the scientific inquiry into the nature of mankind. For the next century, the disciplines of psychology, anatomy, philosophy and the arts would constantly rub up against each other, feeding one another with insights gained both intuitively and empirically.

The human mind has long been a subject of great interest to all the above-mentioned disciplines, largely unknowable in its physical reality before the advent of brain imaging, modern surgical procedures and other means of investigating the biology and functions of the human brain have allowed more concrete insight into the reality of the mind and brain. The fairly new field of cognitive neuroscience has emerged in recent years to put to rest some long-nagging questions about the mind in philosophy and psychology, as well as to confirm the domain of some myseries which are likely to remain elusive for some time yet. A recent book by Daniel Levitan, "This is your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession" is a very popular and remarkable explanation of the latest breakthroughs in cognitive neuroscience particularly related to music. Levitan himself is uniquely poised as both a knowledgeable musician and researcher in the cutting-edge field.

Levitan builds a case for status of music as a fundamentally human activity. Music may be an important factor in sexual selection, and may contribute to social bonding necessary for the survival of the species. Regarding the relationship of music to language, he proposes that "music may be the activity that prepared our pre-human ancestors for speech communication and for the very cognitive, representational flexibility necessary to become humans." (254). Indeed the case for a neurological connection between language and music is quite strong, as he indicates that music "evokes some of the same neural regions that language does, but far more than language, music taps into primitive brain structures involved with motivation, reward and emotion." It is this simultaneous use of both the primitive, reptilian brain (the cerebellum is considered the oldest part of the brain, evolutionarily) and the cerebral cortex in coordinated effort that allows us to experience music as we do. (187). The coming together of rhythm and melody "bridges our cerebellum...and our cerebral cortex..." (257).

While I find Levitan's fieldwork immensely helpful in explaining much of the biological nature of music cognition and his arguments for the evolutionary adaptation to music quite compelling, I feel his conclusions in the final chapter to be a bit far reaching and problematic, mainly for their failure to present a more complex, nuanced view of the sociological context of music. Having presented highly informative and convincing evidence of how music works in our brains, he proceeds to attempt an explaination of why the works of contemporary "classical" composers are "rarely performed by our symphony orchestras" and that "when Copeandand Bernstein were composing, orchestrasplayed their works and the public enjoyed them." (257). Music, in this view, is "listened to by almost no one," and is "a purely intellectual exercise." While contemporary music certainly does struggle for recognition and patronage and composers' tendencey to write music rather out of touch with more visceral, cerebellular sensibility is undoubtedly a factor, there are two significant features of the contemporary music paradigm being left out. For one, the choices made by composers throughout the twentieth century reflected both reaction against existing conformities and motivation to explore new procedures, sounds and structures. Second, the lack of audience enthusiasm and patronage has multiple contributing factors, including the overall evolution of patronage models, the heterostylistic meihem of twentieth century "isms" (which, no doubt, would contribute to confusion and apathy among a mainstream audience) and a simplistic view of 18th and 19th century Europe (where many modern concert-goers may be surprised to discover that the seemingly eternal institution of the orchestra was in fact not a sustainable enterprise for long stretches of time). Levitan's work, though, does have significant merit in bringing to light this formidable body of contemporary empiracle research on the human brain for so many musicians. My critique of his far reaching conclusions, therefore, represents not a diminution of the value of the work, but rather a point of jumping off into the realm of sociology, politics and style, where neurologically informed discussion is much needed.

This new empirical support for the relationship between the movement of the body and the experience of music offers a helpful boost of confidence for proponents of movement in education. What Emile Jacques-Dalcroze intuitively knew at the dawn of the twentieth century is largely confirmed to be true at the dawn of the twenty-first. While Dalcroze's own texts are fairly ancient (written before 1920) his legacy has lived on with continuity throughout the entire twentieth century and to the present. More recent texts have been written by contemporary teachers, including Moore, Mead, and Bachman. These later texts serve to document and disseminate later evolutions of the Dalcroze method in practice, affirming the fruits of the system in usage and exploring new possibilities in an ever-changing music world. Modern teachers, particularly in America, such as Herbe Henke, the late Marta Sanchez and Anabelle Joseph have successfully incorporated such various musical styles as the music of Piazolla, Messian and Bartok. Exercises incorporate these styles both to enhance performance of the often problematic repertoire and to teach new principles in music using examples that stretch the imagination of the more conservatively trained classical musician.

Alexandria Pierce, while not herself a member of the Dalcroze camp, recently published a significant work describing in rare detail the use of movement in music education. Drawing from decades of personal experience, her Deepening Musical Performance through Movement: The Theory and Pracice of Embodied Interpretation maps out a step by step process for engagine the body at various structural levels, refining movement and balance and touching subjects such as shaping phrase, reverberation, juncture, character, and tone. While lying outside the largely melodic, modal focus of this present work, Pierce brings us through a rigourous description of the use of Schenkerian anaylsis (which is based heavily on harmonic progression) in movement, exlporing the differentiation (and assimilation) of structural levels that ring of Cooper and Meyer's theory of archtatechtonic levels. Pierce's insights into the usefullness of movement in teaching musicality often stems from deficiencies and problems exhibited by her students (not unlike Dalcroze's account of the state of the concervatory in the late 19th century). The book is rich with anecdotes where such and such a student's problem was successfully treated with an exploration of movement in exercises devised by the teacher. Such anecdotal evidence abounds in documents of the Dalcroze school, although large scale experimental data has been harder coming. Proponents of the Dalcroze method maintain that the personal experiential nature of Dalcroze education rely on the individual wisdom and experience of the teacher, and widespread mechanical application of Dalcroze principles is unlikely to yield as fruitful results.