The Dalcroze Practice

Dalcroze education specializes in music and movement relationships. These relationships can be applied to a variety of disciplines: music performance, music education, music therapy, dance, dramatic arts, and general education. Learning through experience, discovery, and feeling is a hallmark of Dalcroze education. Dalcroze education embraces life-long learning and can be used with students of all ages and levels.

Underlying the Dalcroze practice is the philosophy that:

• The body is the locus of experience and expression
• Personal development relies on building a harmonious relationship between one’s physical experience and one’s emotions and intellect
• Musical rhythm is a direct expression of the human soul, gestures and thought, and is the ideal medium for the education of the whole person (See The Dalcroze Identity, pages 8–9.)

A Dalcroze education is an education for and through music, that uses the following principles:

• Music as the motivator, stimulator and regulator
• Movement as the primary means for learning (body as instrument)
• Active listening
• Continuous adaptation in response to spatial, social and musical circumstances
• Balancing of time, space and energy for musical and physical ease and expression
• Discovery-based learning
• Experience before analysis
• Imagination, improvisation and invention
• Play
• Social interaction

Within a Dalcroze class, you’ll see a number of characteristic strategies.

These include exercises in quick reaction, canons in sound and motion, time-space-energy explorations, improvisation by both the teacher and students, and others. The exercises are often structured like games, where students respond to changing musical cues given by a teacher, who is typically improvising music for the exercises. Dalcroze teachers adjust the level of challenge in real time by altering their improvisation to match the level of the students, to reflect or correct students’ movement with sound, and to provide just enough surprises to keep students on their toes (sometimes literally).

Observing a demonstration eurhythmics class taught by Jaques-Dalcroze, playwright George Bernard Shaw wrote:

Jaques-Dalcroze, like Plato, believes in saturating his pupils with music. They walk to music, play to music, work to music, obey drill commands that would bewilder a guardsman to music, think to music, live to music, get so clearheaded about music that they can move their several limbs each in a different metre until they become complicated living magazines of cross rhythms, and, what is more, make music for others to do all these things to. … His school is so fascinating that every woman who sees it exclaims “Oh, why was I not taught like this!” and elderly gentlemen excitedly enrol themselves as students and distract classes of infants by their desperate endeavors to beat two in a bar with one hand and three with the other, and start off on earnest walks round the room, taking two steps backward whenever Monsieur Dalcroze calls out “Hop!”

Shaw, George Bernard. “Schoolmasters of Genius,” from A Treatise on Parents and Children. 1910

As Shaw’s observations suggest, the Dalcroze practice goes beyond just teaching music. It seeks to harmonize all of the elements of our inner emotional and intellectual being with the reality of our human bodies in a world of physics and ever-changing external circumstances. And it uses music as the medium for this education.

It’s because of this that we say a Dalcroze education is both a musical education and also an education of the whole human. As composer Frank Martin wrote:

It puts into play simultaneously the main activities of our being: 

• First attention: you must not let anything slide of the music which you are hearing and instantly recording;
• next intelligence, for you must understand and analyze what you’ve heard;
• then sensitivity, you must feel the music you’ve heard, let yourself be open to the movement of the music;
• finally the body puts it in action, and, by its more or less adept movements to the music proves that you’ve been attentive, heard and understood, and been sensitive as well.
  
  …
  
  It is in this simultaneous and constant correspondence of the work of the mind and of the body that you will find the release and joy which comes without fail from a good lesson in Eurhythmics.

Frank Martin, “La rythmique Jaques-Dalcroze” (conference presentation), 1953 Congrès international d’Education musicale in Brussels, trans. Gregory Ristow.