Book Review

Introduction

Picture a landscape. What do you see? Grassy fields; maybe a lake in the distance. Far-off clumps of trees. The focal point of a landscape is the horizon.

Editors John Habron-James, Johanna Laakkonen, and Selma Landen Odom have assembled a collection of fourteen essays by authors such as Marie-Laure Bachmann, William Bauer, and Marja-Leena Juntunen to help us not only picture the vast landscape of Dalcroze practice but also to help us navigate to the horizon and back. The editors are quick to manage expectations. The book is meant as a “rough guide” to a still-evolving practice, a method that “always exceeds our attempts to codify, regulate, or otherwise circumscribe it.” After several chapters, we understand that the “exceptions and wildflowers” are the norm.

Fourteen essays work to understand the present by tracing “histories of music and movement” begun over a century ago by Émile Jaques-Dalcroze. The editors acknowledge “problematic power imbalances” that have followed the work from the beginning and raise difficult questions: Is there a pure Dalcroze form? How does it adapt to time and circumstance? Is it for the musical elite only?

Origins of the Dalcroze Method

Born during one of the most volatile periods in human history, the practice tangled with politics from the very beginning. The first chapters reconstruct the artistic and pedagogical climate in which the landscape began to form. We can ask for no better guide to the ferment of modern dance during the birth of the practice than Selma Odom. She brings Hellerau vividly to life while also countering idealism, quoting dance pioneer Mary Wigman describing some of what she saw as “very beautiful” and some of it as “absolutely boring.” But we also feel the fire of creation in George Bernard Shaw’s description of the furies of Orpheus and Eurydice “all heaped on the floor in a dim light and tossing their arms and legs about . . . like snakes in hell.”

If Odom gives us atmosphere, then former Directrice of the Institut Jaques-Dalcroze Marie Laure Bachmann brings us to the origins of the method. We take music and movement with children for granted now, but it is thrilling to read firsthand accounts of some of the very first eurhythmics lessons. Participants recall joyful and spontaneous, playful experiences that stand in stark contrast to the dry accounts found in the method books. We are reminded that Dalcroze did not single-handedly create the method. Frank Martin describes the constant evolution of the master’s lessons, while Adolphe Appia recalls his willingness to hear feedback from students. 

If Hellerau was the “big bang” of eurhythmics, the rest of the book is devoted to the many galaxies that formed in its aftermath.

Politics, Displacement, and Transnational Spread

From this initial flowering, the book turns to the more complicated question of how the work spread from its place of birth. The first piece of the puzzle is what happened after Jaques-Dalcroze left Germany at the outbreak of World War I. Johanna Laakkonen sheds light on an influence “rarely mentioned in standard dance-history books.” Laakkonen’s excellent scholarship focuses on smaller dance companies and schools in what became known as the Hellerau-Laxamberg method, since Dalcroze’s name was no longer permitted to be used by the government. 

No matter the country, each transplant is shaped by political, social, and cultural forces, as well as by individual personalities. In Germany in the 1920s, responding to enthusiasm for physical education and dance as independent fields, musical study was often deemphasized or dropped, and public performance came to the fore.

In Russia, Dalcroze’s work attracted influential supporters, including Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, and Rimsky-Korsakov, as well as Prince Sergei Volkonsky and Sergei Diaghilev. Pre-war Russia was a hotbed of experimentation, with unusual and proprietary systems such as Biomechanics competing with eurhythmics. After the revolution, rhythmics was briefly recommended for all Soviet schools and even used in soldier training but soon fell out of favor as avant-garde practices were suppressed. New teaching methods diluted the practice and confused the public. 

Brazil presented another path. In Porto Alegre, Dalcroze became associated with elite educational institutions shaped by colonial ideologies of moral and bodily improvement. Importers Nenê Bercht and Mina Black did not study with Jaques-Dalcroze himself but with teachers in his lineage from Germany, and the work adapted accordingly.

Media as Pedagogical Infrastructure

Sandra Nash and Joan Pope offer a more optimistic story in Australia and New Zealand, where close ties to the London School supported continuity. Radio programs modeled on BBC broadcasts flourished despite Jaques-Dalcroze’s skepticism that teaching could occur without seeing students’ responses. The debate has clear echoes today in discussions about online instruction.

In Poland, radio was even more deeply integrated into national education. Highly structured broadcasts coordinated with school curricula produced thousands of songs still in use today, and eurhythmics remains embedded in kindergarten standards. Polish media had dual functions: outreach and curricular infrastructure.

Training, Authority, and National Contexts

Ultimately, the transmission of the method is shaped not by media and technology but by institutional decisions regarding training and authority. The United States presents the most complex and, for American readers, consequential case. Bill Bauer’s chapter reads like a thriller. We begin with Hilda Schuster, devoted to Jaques-Dalcroze, believing she had been granted exclusive rights to train teachers in the US shortly before his death. A 1940 gathering of Dalcroze leaders then redirected American practice toward music education alone, rather than music, dance, and theater, a narrowing that contrasts sharply with developments elsewhere.

Although Jaques-Dalcroze expected to oversee training in New York, he never arrived, and the Dalcroze School of Music operated without credentialing authority. Paul Boepple later instituted an American-style “normal course” under the master’s supervision. After World War II, Schuster assumed leadership, and Bauer portrays her as an autocrat whose insistence on exclusivity seriously limited growth and fostered division. Only in the late 1960s were additional programs authorized, and Schuster denied their legitimacy. Bauer closes with cautious optimism as the DSA works toward consensus in the way Dalcroze teachers are trained in the United States.

Finland provides a striking contrast. As Marja-Leena Juntunen shows, the lineage passed through three teachers who did not have certification. Music and movement education adapted to institutional needs rather than to centralized authority. The practice became well integrated into conservatory structures rather than teacher-training programs. 

Applications and Disciplinary Crossovers

Alongside these national and institutional histories, several chapters trace Dalcroze influence in specific domains other than formal pedagogy. In German piano teaching, eurhythmics contributed principles of holistic, child-centered learning grounded in bodily experience and expressivity rather than specific technical exercises. Other chapters (including on music therapy and aging) suggest how Dalcroze ideas are reframed when absorbed into adjacent disciplines, extending the reach of the method while further blurring its boundaries.

Like all good travel writing, the book gives us a real sense of how vast the world is, and by looking closely at these many manifestations of the work, we may also see ourselves more clearly. Taken together, the essays suggest that what has shaped Dalcroze practice over time is not fidelity to a fixed method but the conditions under which it has flowered: the quality of the soil, the climate, and what is cultivated according to taste, need, and desire. We are again in a time of profound global change, and across these histories, what drives transmission is the passion of individuals who believe in the power of music and movement to change lives and bring us closer to our humanity.