Introduction

DALCROZE THEN AND NOW
Dana Howell


CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION
This paper is designed to relate the life, work and method of Emile Jaques-Dalcroze to problems in music of the present day. In a sense, this is an update to the body of knowledge of the Dalcroze Eurhythmics method, an approach to music education conceived more than a century ago and practiced today in a number of university and children’s programs in Europe, the United States, Australia and Asia. But such an “update” presumes the readers’ familiarity with the subject, either by experience or by encounter. In Marie-Laure Bachmann’s 1991 book Dalcroze Today: An Education through and into Music, the Swiss Dalcrozian goes to considerable ends to articulate how the Dacrloze system of education works, offering an attempt at explaining it to the uninitiated reader. And yet she ultimately holds to the notion that to understand the Dalcroze approach there is no substitute for personal experience. One can know only the standards, framework and outward features of the method without having participated in a class and explored the visceral connection between movement and music, which is the principle promised fruit of this type of guided study.

My objective, however, is not to explain, characterize or define the state of the Dalcroze method as it is now practiced. Rather, it is to build a case for the unique advantages the Dalcroze method offers in understanding and enriching the musical world of today. The impetus for this study is born out of my own personal experience with the Dacrloze method and the sense that something that happened in the late 19th century that spurred Emile Jaques-Dalcroze to work so tirelessly to create his new approach to music education is absolutely linked to my own personal struggles as a performer and composer in 21st century America, I felt this link intuitively through my study of Dalcroze.

Carnegie Mellon University, where I earned undergraduate degrees in both performance and composition, offers one of the most robust Dalcroze Eurhythmics programs for adults (college level music students) anywhere: the program requires a full four semesters of Dalcroze Eurhythmics of all music students. My first two years of Dalcroze study were compulsory, and I was not always so easily convinced of its value. However, through those two years I began to feel something extraordinarily compelling about the use of music both as an ends and a means, realized through liberal and creative use of the body in motion. I then took the four graduate level courses offered in Eurhythmics applications, teaching and improvisation and attended two international workshops held at the university in 2001 and 2006. At the international workshops, I was able to study with renowned European teachers such as Marie-Laure Bachmann and Jean-Marc Aeshermann, American teachers of international stature such as the late Martha Sanchez and Lisa Parker as well as Hiroaki Yoshida of the now well established school in Nagoya and pioneers in the budding Korean and Taiwanese programs. What was so valuable to me personally from this experience was the perspective to be gained from collaborating with this body of practitioners from so many backgrounds and comparing the manifestation of the ideals we held in common in such diverse applications and climates. Jaques-Dalcroze was himself Swiss, and the Geneva school he founded bears his name. Yet the method has been practiced in America for more than 80 years, with a long and rich history dealing with music in a climate that is culturally unique and distinct from Europe. The progress of the East Asian schools provides even more furtile ground for discussing the whys, whats and hows of music in a cultural context in which casual assumptions can not be taken for granted.

TOWARD A WORKING DEFINITION

It was common knowledge among non-music students at Carnegie Mellon University that there was a large, wood-floored classroom in an old building at the center of campus (which also served as an invaluable sheltered corridor during brutal winters) where many hours a week one could peer inside a small square window and see ten to twenty college students performing all sorts of unusual activities. Sometimes they would appear to be dancing joyfully, while at other times they sat on the floor puzzling over some frustrating paperwork. There was often a teacher playing music on the piano, and students would variously engage in partner, group or solo activities to somehow interpret some stimulus given in the piano. On some days an eavesdropper might see all the students take hand-drums, tennis balls or even colored nylon stockings out of the closet and use them in different ways.

Non-participating visitors to a Eurhythmics class tend to be confused about what exactly it is they are watching. Passers-bye will often immediately take the class for some beginning level dance class, the bare feet, piano music and whole body movement giving such an impression. Yet the students do not look like dancers, and likely exhibit considerable sophistication in their approach to their activities (it is certainly not a “beginners” dance class, despite some noticeable physical awkwardness). The confusion that Eurhythmics is Dance has been around since the early days of the work of Jaques-Dalcroze, and teachers have been careful to disambiguate the two disciplines. Dr. Annabelle Joseph often remarks that Eurhythmics “probably looks like a bad dance class” and sternly insists that it is in fact not dance and that the principle difference is that the objective of dance is to show something, while that of Eurhythmics is to work something out internally through movement (and the resulting successful outcome may or may not be something pretty to look at). This distinction is rather helpful in holding off the “bad dance” critique, though Jaques-Dalcroze’s work with dancers as well as his frequent public demonstrations of La Rythmique and performances of plastique anime have rendered an easy distinction between Eurhythmics and dance perpetually problematic.
Bachmann is keenly aware of the failure of Eurhythmics to concisely identify itself and follows the problem from its roots in Jaques-Dalcroze’s stubborn refusal to accept simple classification of his ideas. While acknowledging the inherent “Achilles heal” of such a stance, she maintains that the lack of clear identity is necessary, for “vulnerable it certainly is, for this is inevitable in any person or system which keeps nothing hidden and holds nothing back, and yet, being necessarily unable to reveal all its facets at once to any single observer, cannot be grasped from one point of view without being misunderstood or misrepresented as a whole.” (24). But it would be unfair to engage the reader in a discussion of the formation and utility of a method or movement that has very real participants who engage in very real activities without providing at least some working definition of what this hard-to-know structure is. Vague as they are, there are some features of the method - ideals or “scientific” assumptions held by proponents at its core of that are extremely useful in developing a framework from which familiarity with the method can be developed.

Many Dalcrozian’s refer to “Dalcroze” as an approach or perspective, and avoid whenever they can the term method. There are in the marketplace plenty of examples of how within the notion of “method” there seems to be a diversity in what it really means. A teacher might achieve admirable success teaching students with a book series such as the Bastien piano method but would encounter considerable frustration in using a Suzuki method book in the same way, which is fairly useless unless used as a tool in teaching with Suzuki’s approach - a deeply considered way of teaching which relies on assumptions about child development and a pronounced humanistic perspective. Acknowledging this distinction between method and approach is key to understanding Dalcroze and why easy definition and user-friendly publications are not forthcoming. While I find the use of the words “approach” and “perspective” preferable as they avoid the problematic confusion of “method,” it is impossible to avoid using the term method as it is the primary means of referring to the educational work of Emile Jaques-Dalcroze and has been such in print for over a century.

A working definition for Dalcroze Eurhythmics or, as Jaques-Dalcroze referred to it, “the method that bears my name,” should clearly identify the method’s intentions (the “promises” of what it hopes to accomplish) as well as the basic means by which this goal should be accomplished and the assumptions made about the material used in service of these means. What Jaques-Dalcroze intended to accomplish is quite clear in his many writings about his teaching as well as his recommendations for music education (music in schools and in the conservatory) and dance. Identifying the objectives of Dalcroze-Eurhythmics should also take into account statements of qualified, well-regarded practitioners. Jaques-Dalcroze provides a clear and concise statement of his objectives in forming a new system in the introduction to his 1914 essay, “Rhythmic movement, solfege and improvisation” where he writes:

A special gymnastic system, habituating muscles to contract and relax, and corporal lines to widen and shrink in time and space, should supplement metrical feeling and instinct for rhythm. (115).

And later:

The fact is, that for the precise physical execution of a rhythm, it is not enough to have grasped it intellectually and to possess a muscular system capable of interpreting it; in addition, and before all else, communications should be established between the mind that conceives and analyses, and the body that executes. (116).

Bachmann, nearly eighty years later, writes in very similar language that eurhythmics “facilitates the discovery of the laws governing relations between space, time and energy.” (Bachmann 19). Jaques-Dalcroze also wrote famously that the aim of eurhythmics “is not to enable pupils at the end of their course, to say, not ‘I know,’ but ‘I have experienced,’ a catch-phrase echoed by eurhythmics practitioners to this day.

The means of accomplishing stated goals is a fuzzier matter, since there is no set curriculum (practitioners tend to be directly opposed to the idea) and comparative observation of various teachers’ approaches at a conference will confirm a distinct plurality in course content, sequence and exercises. But the basic notion that the body should be used for its natural capacities in learning music and that the body should also be trained to accommodate the nuances of musical material is apparent across the spectrum of the diverse population of instructors. A class that failed in this general use of means would clearly lie outside what is “Dalcrozian.” Also, while contemporary Dalcroze Eurhythmics courses are not specifically bound to the structured content spelled out in Rhythm, Music and Education (which leans heavily on the ideas of Matthias Lussey and will be explored in the third chapter), such direct documentation of process should be taken into account in determining the means of Eurhythmics as it is frequently used today and also provides a model for creating structure (structure, even as a generality, is an important feature of how the method works).

The assumptions made about the materials used in accomplishing the stated objectives of eurhythmics (namely, the nature of the mind, body, musical rhythm and the space-time-energy relationship) are paramount to describing the identity of the approach. In an era coinciding with huge advances in the field of psychology but predating by nearly a century the discoveries of neuroscience through brain imaging, Jaques-Dalcroze committed to an understanding of the human mind, how it perceives music and how the experience of music is simultaneously both locomotor and intellectual. While apparently taking for granted a mind-body dualism prevalent in earlier psychological and scientific thought, I will show in chapter 3 how Jaques-Dalcroze’s scientific assumptions can be better understood through looking at Matthias Lussey’s remarkable empirical distillation of musical gesture. The notion that layers of musicality can and should be dissociated and reintegrated in education reveals a significant assumption about the nature of musicality, namely that it is not mysterious or unusual (as is frequently held to be an immutable fact).

Finally, to produce a framework for building an understanding of Dalcroze Eurhythmics without impeding on its flexible nature, we can identify it thus: Dalcroze Eurhythmics is an approach to teaching musicality that uses the body’s natural functionality to explore music as well as the existing structure in music to develop the body’s locomotor sensitivity to music through structured exercises based on the assumption that the body’s experience in physical space and time is analogous musical gesture.

THE IMPORTANCE OF DALCROZE TODAY

Why study the life, work and legacy of Emile Jaques-Dalcroze? There are, after all, myriad marketable methods for educating pupils and encouraging interest in the arts. The Dalcroze method at times seems to be at a disadvantage as its enthusiastic proponents struggle to articulate even its basic tenets while clearly defined, trendier methods publish glossy lesson supplements and open pastel colored, profitable enrichment schools for children faster than paint can dry.

A more pertinent question would be, “what is the point of musicians (performers, composers and amateurs) studying Dalcroze today, in America, in the early years of the 21st century?” To begin to answer this question, we must begin by associating the conditions of musical society today with the conditions under which a particular young Swiss composer named Emile Jaques-Dalcroze struggled in his early career in the late 19th century and which led him to make some remarkable discoveries about the nature of musicality - discoveries that eventually materialized into a method that would elicit considerable recognition in its early years and survive more than a century under the collective stewardship of a group of dedicated and talented teachers.

The Dalcroze method is an approach - a proposed solution. And solutions are responses to frustrating problems that gnaw at the consciousness of the perceptive individual until he or she discovers a novel response that breaks through, bypasses or evades the frustrating roadblock that hinders further accomplishment. Emile Jaques-Dalcroze was one such individual who, frustrated as an unconventional student of classical music in Geneva, Paris and Vienna, as a composer and as a proponent of music in education sought to unlock the blockage that perturbed him. In the following chapter, I will relate his experiences, particularly in his early years, for the purpose of identifying these frustrations as a necessary factor in the formation of his method.

Frustrations that antagonize musicians today are abundant, ranging from the complaints of teachers whose pupils render masterpieces without expression to sociologists who apply new modes of social criticism to once sacred Great Works to composers who struggle to be relevant to an ambivalent audience (or scoff at the notion of social consciousness in pursuit of the absolute ). The financial woes of musicians, mundane as they may seem, frequently trigger practically existential crises among performers who feel lost amid a seemingly apocalyptic decline of classical music.

In merely associating our present situation with the conditions at the inception of the curiously effective yet somewhat mysterious Dalcroze method, we gain remarkable perspective on the truth behind many of these frustrations that hinder fluency of performance, satisfaction among audiences and compliance with ethical standards. They can be divided roughly into two groups: one, frustrations that are common with the previous era, and the other, those that seem to have sprung up only in our own era as a result of our unique historical context. For the former group, we need only look to Jaques-Dalcroze's extensive writings on subjects of education, performance, dance and composition, where he complains endlessly about the state of music in schools that could easily be mistaken for an address delivered to a music education conference of the present day.

Frustrations of the latter group - those that seem to be new issues faced only by musicians today - are the reason I believe a new, up-to-date discussion of Jaques-Dalcroze's ideas is so important. The method itself is principally a perspective or an approach, not a set of instructions to accomplish a particular task. The method in practice therefore tends to be at its source the very real struggles and personality of a particular man, and in its dissemination the collaborative and self-correcting effort of a multitude of diverse personalities over the course of a century. Since Jaques-Dalcroze's death in 1950 and even since the most recent significant text written by a Dalcrozian exponent in 1993 (Marie-Laure Bachmann's Dalcroze Today ) a lot has happened. In the last twenty years, feminist and post-colonial critique of music have revolutionized the discipline of Musicology, asking tough questions about the gender and racial codings that apparently exist as a significant layer in the fabric of works once held to be absolute and immutable to criticism. In 1993, the Cold War ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union, ending decades of culture wars and paranoia that had profoundly affected American schools, universities, foundations and symphony orchestras. And in that time, scientists have looked inside the physical reality of the human brain and seen for the first time how music is really produced and listened to on a neurological level.

A PROPOSAL

I hold that these recent events and discoveries are not simply issues of the day but are in fact game-changing phenomena that will shape our perspective on music, classical or otherwise, in the coming years. Jaques-Dalcroze matured as a musician and conceived his method at the end of the Common Practice, an era of roughly two centuries where composers of a particular (though notably international) geographic region used the common language of tonality and a number of assumptions about music to collaboratively develop and evolve a notated body of work that would ultimately collapse under the weight of increasing complexity and its own fundamental undoability. Classical music of the early years of the twentieth century plunged into violent fragmentation and myriad isms as the gigantic cultural and political forces of Europe fought for identity and direction in the wake of catastrophic loss. Yet nearly a century later, the world of classical music is as fragmented as ever with no overall trend or direction - and will most likely remain so forever. However, Emile Jaques-Dalcroze's principle objective was a humanistic and universal one: to advocate the simple enjoyment of music and the freedom for people to be their natural, inherently musical beings. In his life, music and teaching, Jaques-Dalcroze appears to have been rather ambivalent to what was old and what was new, classical or folk, tonal or atonal. His most revolutionary quality was not to assault establishment with some newfangled, fractured style, but rather to embrace musicality as a substance and a human right in preference to objects of cultural or extrinsic value. The results of a study of the formation of the Dalcroze method according to Msgr. Jacques-Dalcroze's historical context, experiences and personality will demonstrate the value of the method in confronting both frustrating issues inherited from the past as well as those unique to the present day.