Imagination, Improvisation, and Invention

I remember myself as a young, evangelical Dalcroze teacher, sitting in my music ed methods grad school class with my well-known, well-read (and well-published) professor. I was expressing frustration because there weren’t enough studies that demonstrated the effectiveness of Dalcroze education. People didn’t understand “how Dalcroze worked,” and so Dalcroze education was constantly struggling to become more widely known and used.

“So how does it work?” she asked. As I started explaining how experiences in the body would naturally translate to improving a musician’s ability to play more musically, I could feel how hollow my words were ringing in an environment that highly valued academic rigor. I couldn’t point to any studies that proved any sort of causality between creative, purposeful movement experiences and the ability to play musically. Most of the world’s master musicians have never set foot in a Dalcroze class. Many have not even heard of it or have only a vague notion of what it is.

After that experience, I realized I didn’t need to prove or—much worse—believe in anything. I simply needed to articulate my own experience. After a Dalcroze class, I often felt more connected and integrated with myself and my community. I valued the insights into rhythm, harmony, and melody that I had gained from it. It gave me a highly flexible, experienced-based approach to teaching music that I could use with almost anyone. That was my experience, and that was enough.

After freeing myself from the need to convince people of the worth of the method from an empirical point of view, my answer to the question “How does Dalcroze work?” changed from talking about its supposed effects on students to describing what makes a Dalcroze class a Dalcroze class. The answers to this question are clear and knowable.

So this is the first of a series of articles on the basic principles of Dalcroze education (see the list of Principles, Strategies, and Techniques of Dalcroze Education). This article is partially about improvisation, but I won’t be discussing how to improvise. It’s about what makes improvisation and its cousins, imagination and invention, essential elements of Dalcroze education. And hopefully it will contribute a bit to the understanding of “how Dalcroze works.”

Fortunately, not long after my grad school experience, the Dalcroze Society of America organized a group of master Dalcroze teachers in the United States to come up with their own list of essentials. Yes, there are degrees of subjectivity. There are elements some consider crucial that may not be as important to others. There is no single formula, no recipe, but if many of these elements are well integrated into a classroom experience, chances are high that it will succeed as a Dalcroze lesson.

The principles on this list are certainly not exclusive to Dalcroze education. In fact, most of them are things good teachers (of almost anything) regularly do. But when these elements are present in a classroom that is employing basic Dalcroze teaching strategies and techniques, you’ve got yourself a Dalcroze class. It is the special combination of these principles that makes every class unique and gives every Dalcroze teacher a unique stamp. For me, improvisation, imagination, and invention are at the top of the list.

The Three I’s

One of the reasons I love being a Dalcroze teacher is that both the planning and the execution of a lesson can feel like making art. In the list of principles, improvisation is grouped with two other “i-words” usually associated with creativity: imagination and invention. These three are pillars of the artistic process. Each could make a strong case for having their own line-item. How do the three work together? What do they have in common? And maybe more usefully, how are they different?

The three elements have different relationships to time. In the classroom, improvisation is mostly about the present moment (though it definitely maintains a connection with the past and has an eye toward the future). Its value lies in the irreversible choices we must make, for example, to keep a melody going or to maintain grace and balance while stepping a challenging rhythm. Invention is for the future (even if just the immediate future) and is often about problem-solving. (More on that below.) Imagination can freely traverse all modes of time: children become kings and queens, fly through the room with their jet packs, or become spiders lowering themselves to the ground.

Put them all together and they can function like a cycle of weather: imagination playing water evaporation to create the clouds of invention, which then turn into improvisation’s rain.

Improvisation runs through the Dalcroze genetic code at every level. As teachers we employ it in countless ways: we improvise as a means of teaching; we teach others to improvise; we improvise the way we teach to fit the needs of the moment; and on and on. It is impossible to imagine a Dalcroze class devoid of improvisation. There has been much writing on how to improvise for Dalcroze classes (see the resource list below) and musical improvisation in general. In a previous issue of Dalcroze Connections, I wrote of it as a teaching strategy.

Much less has been written explicitly on imagination and invention in relation to Dalcroze education. What are they, and how do they function in Dalcroze education?

Imagination

Imagination is the wellspring for both improvisation and invention. My colleague Greg Ristow considers imagination to be anacrusic to improvisation, an idea he acquired from Émile Jaques-Dalcroze himself in La Musique et Nous:

Any artistic work is the direct expression, at a given moment, of the author’s feelings, after a period of meditation or after the unexpected pronouncement of a spontaneous thought. This latter thought may have been repressed for a time, but–time having accomplished its work–it surges suddenly from the depths of our unconscious. This anacrusis is the generator of the form, of the construction of, and of the development of the work. (1945, 203)

Imagination can be spontaneous and whole: Mozart conceiving of an entire symphony in his mind before committing it to paper, for example, or a child becoming a cat at the briefest of suggestions. For the young ones it is a question of directing, harnessing, guiding, and simply taking advantage of the imagination. For the older ones it is often necessary to activate slumbering or sluggish imaginations, to gently work through layers of protection that have built up over the years. Stories and images are obvious for children, but adults can benefit too. When our image-making minds are engaged, our analytical and calculating minds are less likely to dominate. Body intelligence has a chance to lead. This can be very liberating!

The most basic Dalcroze activity, translating sound into movement, itself requires an act of imagination, but images can inspire movement apart from the everyday. How would you walk if you were on ice? What would it feel like to fly? What’s it like to be an elephant? Each one calls up a different set of physical properties and so conjures up a unique constellation of musical dynamics, tempos and articulations.

In English, at least, the word “imagination” is closely tied to the visual sense. But just as visual artists must see in their mind’s eye, musicians must hear in their mind’s ear. One of my goals in the Dalcroze classroom is that students will be able to call up any music they want in their aural imaginations: music that moves in threes; syncopated rhythms; the sound of a single tone as one of seven possible scale degrees. This is our aural and kinesthetic imagination, and it’s the key to developing solid musicianship skills as well as musical literacy and understanding, which are goals of Dalcroze education.

Whether we are adults giving physical shape to the feeling of a harmonic progression or children becoming machines that can change between duple, triple, and quadruple meter at the press of a button, activated imaginations give life to analysis beyond mere labeling and identification.

Invention

I define invention as a special category of creation. With invention the focus is on something novel, something that has not been done before, and perhaps is a tool that can be used over and over. Not every creation is an invention. My latest painting or a sonata that I composed may be brand new and definitely my own creation, for example, but I did not invent the form. Every invention is a creation, however. Inventions fulfill needs and serve functions. They can be recreated and used again by others.

Émile Jaques-Dalcroze was an inventor par excellence. The list is long: singing scales from scale degrees other than the tonic; stepping rhythm patterns of varying durations (rather than the steady beat); plastique animée; the entire concept and practice of eurhythmics! These were all tailor-made to address the challenges his students were facing and the deficiencies he saw in them.

Today, though we are still using many of his inventions (if altered and modified to fit the needs of our own era), we still need to find solutions to new problems. Our students are exposed to and interested in learning about a far greater range of music than those who worked with Jaques-Dalcroze, for example. Not all these musics are best transmitted through standard notation, and the expectations of what it means to be musically literate, much less to create or perform music, have drastically changed. How will we serve them while maintaining the core identity of eurhythmics? As we move forward, we will need to be inventors and innovators.

The best inventions are adaptable and useful in multiple contexts. For example, children usually play frame drums with a very limited sonic palette, usually striking the drum with the whole hand forcefully. (Actually, adults tend to do this too!) But there is a remarkable range of sounds possible from the instrument if we play with other parts of the hand: fingertips, fingernails, knuckles on the rim, the back of the hand, etc. I invented something I call “drum language” (or “drumlish” if I want to elicit a giggle). It has “words” like brush, touch, pat, scratch, swirl, and knock. Once the children learn it, I can use it for a variety of activities that call for the recognition or execution of rhythmic patterns, dynamics, articulation, and nuance. It is my own small but useful invention.

Anne Farber famously invented “The Five Ways to Call for a Do-to-Do Scale”. The list includes playing C with the {rn:V7} of the key (perhaps not her own invention); “the whisk” (the teacher plays up and down the scale from C to C as quickly and as lightly as possible); the tritone plus two other tones of the scale. (The five ways seemed to me to continually grow. There was always a new sixth way!) These inventions came to her as she taught (or she borrowed them from others), and her students continue to use them—and invent their own ways.

Creating a Lesson

I have many books with lesson plans in them. I love looking at them but almost never use them directly. I believe this is similar to the way many people use recipe books, mostly as inspiration. (In cooking, though, I am quite happy to follow a recipe. It is a relief!) I think this is true for many Dalcroze teachers. When a lesson has come through my own imagination, I have direct access to it in the classroom in a way that I do not if it has come through someone else’s. Without that direct access, it is very difficult for me to guide, shape, alter, and adapt the course of a lesson as students respond to it through their own improvisation, imagination, and inventions.

Improvisation is very much a part of my own lesson-planning process. Ideas flow so much easier after I’ve spent even ten minutes just freely playing or moving. Once those doors are open, it is much easier for me to imagine what kind of movement I’m hoping to see, how the students might interact, or how I might play. I visualize (i.e. imagine) my students: their particular strengths and weaknesses, their personalities, their interests. Though the musical goal is clear from year to year, I need to imagine this particular set of students and pair this with what is alive for me in this moment.

I don’t think of each lesson as an invention, but I am very aware of all the inventions I make use of in every class: use these hoops to physicalize the pattern of a major scale; step in canon to the rhythms you hear; bounce, catch, and pass the ball to match the meter, and on and on. I often marvel, “Someone was the first to invent each of these!” And we have been spinning variations on a theme ever since.

Executing a Lesson

As a new teacher, my imagination was very active. Unfortunately, it envisioned responses from students that didn’t happen! So I was forced to improvise, sometimes with success, often with failure. Fortunately, the children’s imaginations were active too. Many of the things I do in my classes for kids came directly from their responses to my own inexperience, which were often much better than anything I had imagined.

Many of the other principles of Dalcroze education involve imagination, improvisation, and invention too. For example, in activities in which active listening is foregrounded, students are often required to hold a musical element in their aural imagination, or their mind’s ear. They are constantly comparing what they hear to an image they are holding. Is this it? How about this? This is not a creative use of imagination, but rather a functional “if…then” use of the imagination that is no less important for responsive, adaptive human functioning as well as musical comprehension. This was identified by Émile Jaques-Dalcroze in Les Principes des Solfège, page 3, as one of the central propositions of his method—that is, how eurhythmics “worked”:

“Impressions received from outside of ourselves can only be used in expression by us if we are capable of recreating them in our imagination at will. Thus, we would do well to voluntarily revisit in ourselves any impression that we want to hold on to, before it is erased from our memory, and to repeat it as often as is necessary so that it becomes definitively acquired.“

Teachers must not only imagine how their students will respond to a given event but must instantly make adjustments to ensure a healthy balance of challenge and success. I must continually imagine the response my students will make and adjust what I play, giving them repeated opportunities to revisit the impressions that I want them to hold on to.

A Vision

We use improvisation, imagination, and invention in the classroom, but are we teaching them too? Explicitly, usually not. Dalcroze education is most often applied to musicianship training. But implicitly? I think we are. Or at least, I imagine that I am. But we could decide to make it an explicit goal of Dalcroze education for all.

Here is my vision: Students who have spent time in a Dalcroze class will invent new ways to approach their instruments—or invent new instruments! They will approach their interpretive work with an abundance of imagination rather than falling back on what they have heard on YouTube or been told to do by their teachers. They will become genre-crossing improvisers and compose music in startling and innovative ways.

Will this happen? I don’t know. For now, I can only imagine it.