Keynote and Lifetime Achievement Award

Okay.

Hello everybody and welcome to our evening sessions.

Um, we have a wonderful couple of performances

for you first, so I would,

it was quite lovely.

Thank you guys. That's really wonderful.

Alright, next we have a performance with

Wiktoria and Anna.

Um, it's especially meaningful to me that without this

is receiving a lifetime achievement award.

Um, in 1983,

Robert Emerson started his Dalcroze training program

and his co-director

of the program at the time was Ruth Alperson.

So I first met her when I started my certificate training

at Manhattan School of Music.

And throughout the past 40 years,

Ruth has just been an incredible source of inspiration

for me as a mentor and as a colleague.

Um, she was the person

who hired me at Hoff Baron Music School in Dale,

where I worked for many years.

Um, but even later on she, uh,

was very involved in creating a pred diploma program, uh,

working with, uh, colleagues and Silvia del Bianco

and Sylvia Morgan, um,

to encourage people to proceed, uh,

further in their dental retraining pass the license

and with the hope of, uh, going to Geneva and studying.

So I really owe it to Ruth, uh,

and her encouraging me to continue on in my studies.

But I also just want to say that, um,

I remember watching Ruth teach a children's class once,

and, um, it really brought me to tears to see

how she was, um, helping these children

to discover their authentic selves through music.

And this is the gift that she has as a teacher

that she's given to so many of us.

So, Ruth, thank you for all that you have done for me

and for all of us to advance our understanding of music

and movement and GoPro's education.

So I just want to mention a few of the wonderful things

that Ruth has done in her career.

Um, first of all, she's studied

a very broad diverse group

of individuals here in the Dalcroze community, um,

in the United States and abroad in Europe.

She studied here at Oberlin.

Within the Hulu, she also studied, um,

with Elizabeth Vander Spa in London,

and then of course at the Institut Jaques-Dalcroze, um,

in Geneva, Switzerland.

You can find, um, books by Elizabeth Vander Spa in the, um,

library out front.

So please, those books are great,

so you should check those out.

Um, her dissertation from NYU was on a qualitative study

of delrose religious classes for adults,

which is a very good read

and it's very instructive for all of us.

So please check that out.

Um, she directed the, um, Dalcroze programs at Diller Quail,

and she was, uh, the dean

of Hot Markson for many, many years.

She taught at NYU

and as Bill mentioned, um,

was instrumental in teaching folks at, uh,

with Bob Abramson at Manhattan School of Music in the summers.

Um, she also taught with Lisa Parker at the Longy School

of Music, and she has taught across the United States, Asia,

Eastern and Western Europe, Australia

and Central America Academy in

Canada, Del forbid, Canada.

Canada. She's the founding member at the International

Conference of Dalcroze Studies.

And, um, she currently sits on the board trustees

for the Dalcroze Society of America.

You can see why I get my computer.

She has done so much, but that all this was lovely.

But like Bill, um, Ruth was one

of my very first DA Coasts mentors.

And, um, back in 2002 when I started my training

and, um, I have some quotes that I remember from my,

my training with her.

And one of the first ones that she said to me was,

be your musical self.

Love the music that you teach,

because children can sense that type of authenticity

and they feel it.

And if you want to communicate

what music feels like, you better love it.

And I keep that, I keep

that information right here on my shoulder.

Um, no matter how well you've planned,

be ready to change directions,

Watch The children.

They want to be noticed And they want to be appreciated

for who they're, and I really use

that wisdom in my teaching all the time

because when I see students that are, um, in the background

and I want to bring them forward, the the way to do it

is to appreciate who they are.

And maybe it's just the way

that they're wiggling their toe to the rhythm.

Maybe it's just a gesture of the shoulder,

but it's something, and

that gives you a launching off point.

So I use that. Thank you.

And then, um, this last one is huge for me.

Imbue your teaching with layering so that way your students

feel, I am right, I am right.

I can do this with every step that they take.

Because when you give students that type of confidence,

something that they will carry the rest of their lives.

And so thank you Ruth. I'd like to invite you to come up.

We have a little award for you,

and thank you for all that you have done for the community.

This is a, um, lifetime that she award to Dr.

Ruth Hal for. Thank you so much.

Am I? Yes.

Well, I just wanna say, uh, What was just said by

Bill and Jeremy, um, having seen them teach, you know,

that they've surpassed whatever it is they were,

they had gone way beyond and

or their, um, authentic selves attention.

Wonderful. Um, I do have people to thank,

uh, I'm here because of them.

We're all here because of them, people who organized for us.

And I do want to thank, uh, Greg.

So,

You know, I was a student here I graduated from,

and Oberland college choir was one

of the great choirs in the US and still is.

And I'm so proud, Greg, for being the director.

I can hardly believe it. I mean, I can believe it.

Uh, it's just wonderful what you've accomplished here.

And I want thank Alex, Martha Fowler.

I think I bothered him more than anybody, um, for being

so gracious all the time

and always helping to have a jam, which usually had to do

with something technical.

And, um, Lori Gordon, who's chair of the board

of Trustees, um, I call Lori quite a bit.

And, um, I know there's somebody I forgot

who I wanted to mention.

If I may remember, I'll interrupt by myself later.

But I'm very happy to be here with all of you.

This is such a special, um, it's such a special discipline

and that was shared.

I'm very grateful to be teaching Dalcroze.

I have been a learner.

Uh, my Dalcroze career began here. I was a senior.

Uh, I had been in the conservatory as a performance major,

piano performance,

and then I switched into the college as a music major.

Uh, in my senior year.

I needed a two credit course, and I looked in the catalog

and it said Eurythmics, which wasn't very well known,

but when I inquired about it,

I found out you better get in there quickly

because it closes out every year

and they let seniors in first, and you're a senior.

So I was the last one.

And it changed my life as you some of you may know

and you'll, you'll learn.

Um, I found myself in a class that was nothing like

what I had expected.

Uh, when I walked in the Rhythmics room, I was greeted

by the teacher in Howard.

She had on a very colorful, she dressed

her brave round around her head.

She had very active eyes and she was barefoot.

And I was so excited

because one of the things I loved best to do

when I was a kid was when everybody was out of the house,

I would put my favorite records on the record player,

you know, pile 'em up, turn the volume up as far

as it would go, and I would dance

around the house to the music.

And I remember going through the kitchen

and the, you know, things that were hanging up would

touch each other and make sounds.

And I thought, you know, they're celebrating with me.

And I loved that.

And then here I am back in class at Oberlin in college

where we're doing just that.

When I saw the bare feet though, I thought, this,

this is gonna be great.

Um, all of us were seniors.

We were directed by ended to leave our coats and shoes

and socks in the cloak room.

So nothing was on the floor, no backpacks.

It was completely clear.

All there was in the room was a Steinway Grand piano,

a stereo system, a little table.

And I, there was a board chalkboard.

The first thing we did was sit in a circle

and we were already kind of terrified of her.

Uh, the picture you see, the photo Greg found on his head,

she was a little scary in a good way.

And, uh, the picture you see in the, uh, program

is nothing like she was, it was very mild.

Um, she was a bear.

She was very strong, very opinionated,

and we all loved to this.

She was also such a fine musician.

Um, so we were sitting in a circle

and, uh, I forgot to mention,

we each had a drum, beautiful drum animal, skin heads,

and long wood shell behind you.

You hug under one arm, you're sitting in the circle.

And I look around and what I see are toes.

And I, I've been here in three

and a half years or three years.

I've never seen toes in a class.

And you know, I just,

my hopes were really very high at that point.

So yeah, we were sitting in the circle, Inda has a drum,

and she starts just moving.

Didn't make it sound, but once she started

moving, it was a pulse.

It was a tempo. I noticed.

Everybody's moving, everybody's,

you know, you just see them.

And everybody's was moving their heads.

They were flexing their feet. And then I realized, so away.

So we're all ready feeling we're internalizing the

temple she's getting.

And then she said, we're going to pass around as beef.

And then she made the first sound,

which was absolutely beautiful,

and she passed it to the person next to her.

And I was so excited.

I thought, this is like going back

to the beginning of music.

It was just, and I thought,

I've never done this before in the class.

It was thrilling.

And anyway, but we couldn't do it.

We couldn't pass the beer around.

People were a little nervous and they'd come in too quickly

or, you know, the sound room travel.

And so, you know, here we were,

senior year performance majors mostly,

and we couldn't pass around.

So that was first day.

Um, and we found it that, that it was

that way all the way through.

Uh, we were mistaken to think that some

of this work was going to be easy.

Some of it was simple, but it wasn't easy.

And, um, anyway, that was my first, uh,

my first class.

And after that we did more movement standing up,

moving around, uh, never technically difficult movement,

but movement in the service of music.

And, uh,

Inda was the first American woman

to get a diploma from Geneva.

She studied with Al Pros for two years,

and her mother lived with her in Geneva.

'cause Salina that age didn't travel alone like that.

And, uh, anyway, when she came back, she used a lot

of the techniques that she had learned at the institute,

but as time went on, she changed some of the approaches.

For example, she didn't use any

armies after a while.

She dispensed with those.

Now she was a dancer and a choreographer,

and so she was very aware of forms.

And what was important was that, uh,

in the end she did everything, you know,

her way, but also this was absolutely identifiable

as Ademic class.

It was like a lot of the other classes I had taken.

But she integrated a lot of

what she was doing in her life, uh, into the classes.

So she kept changing what she was doing.

At one point I was so just taken with her teaching

and wanted to, you know, uh, plug in depths of this.

And I decided I would go meet, uh, a man named Roy Wickson.

Roy was an organ student here.

Uh, but he became like a, a son to end up.

And he eventually became a lawyer.

And Roy, they remained very close.

He was the executor of her will.

And, um, he had, he was her sole heir.

So he had all her stuff, drums and all kinds of items.

What I wanted to look at most of all was

the little notes.

The book into Howard always had on the piano show

for every lesson, like three ring binder

with these little pages that were lined.

And that's what I wanted to look at.

What did she write in those plans?

So, uh, when I saw Ro he had boxes of things

and he said, what would you like to see?

And I said, uh, do you have her plans?

Do you have her little notebook? And he said, no.

He said she earned one every year at the end

of the school year, she had a ritual on,

and she threw in anything she, she wouldn't need

for a future of them.

And every year she threw away her notes.

And I think that attest to the fact that she kept changing

and doing things differently.

She took a sabbatical, Southeast Asia,

where she studied Galon in Bali,

and she studied tie dance in Thailand.

She studied with master teachers.

When she came back, she integrated a lot of

that into her lessons here.

So she, she was constantly using new ideas

and changing her lessons.

Um, there are so many stories about her.

One I told Greg, which was that, um,

there was one lesson I told you, kind of scared of her that

that never went away.

I mean, it was her kind of reverence

for this teacher who was big.

And, uh, the fear was, you know, uh,

not, not fear of the person,

but, uh, she just had such a big presence.

It was demanding of us as she was at first herself.

Um, we all came to class one day.

She'd never been out and she wasn't there.

And we just went to leave to the float room.

We took our shoes and socks off, we left our coats there,

and we sat in the circle with our toes wiggly.

And we waited

and she appeared the doorway.

And she, you just saw her head

and she said, above,

it's purple and it has blue dot somewhere

there, it's, and we looked

and she said, Bob, it's coming into the room.

And we watched that bug come into the room

and whoops, up the wall up to the ceiling quickly,

and then pressed the ceiling down quickly.

And we followed that bug.

We followed that bug for, I dunno

how long it went all over the place.

It hit under the piano.

We waited for it to hit under the stereo.

We waited for it to come out.

And finally it ran outta the room in stood up,

went to the doorway, and turned back and looked at us.

And she said to us, and that how you have

to listen to music.

And then she walked away.

I told Greg that, and Greg said, yes, he had heard that.

I'm sure she did that, other years of it, ours.

But that is an important story

because that was her goal in working with us,

that we had an unbroken, uh, listening to the music

that we never stopped.

And the kinds of work we did was work that held us

in the kind of grip, the music.

Uh, I mentioned she gave, she, she didn't use armies

and she just didn't like them

because they were the same all the time.

And she was a dancer and she wanted arms to be free.

So she devised a, a way of our sort of moving

with the music, with our arms.

And she called it the swings.

They were swings, but they were done in a particular way.

We had to start with momentum here.

And they continued and more momentum here

and momentum there, and we can do that.

Um, she at Carnegie Mellon, I forget the year,

many years ago, she participated in a summer conference.

And what did she do for an entire week

with the class swings?

I was mortified because we worked on it here in our classes.

But I thought, this is not for us summer conference.

And some of the participants work, you know,

they, they look at each other.

'cause she was doing swings, swings

and second day at day three at the giving swing.

But the way it paid off was that finally, uh,

the, I think it was the last day, she had people swing

with particular recordings she brought in.

And we did so much listening

and the swings helped us understand the music

and listen to it while we were moving,

because there wasn't much technical involved here.

It was just doing these swings this way

and swinging with the music, with the energy,

with the articulation and so on.

Um, and in fact,

you're gonna do an exercise using swings

before I, I'm finished.

Um, what, what the swings will allow us

to do is participate physically

in understanding being with the music.

So we were swinging along with the music, whatever we heard,

we swung and we could, we could move our feet,

we could move on the floor.

Um, but this was a way

of analyzing it in a non cerebral way as a way

of analyzing using body movement.

Uh, I love, I loved that.

Uh, also she was teaching mostly performance majors,

people going into music, professionally, performance.

Uh, whereas all my other ics

after Inda was geared to teaching

and geared to teaching EU rhythmic classes, which I wanted,

and I would want to be able to do that.

Uh, but I think in working with performers, she had other,

uh, other issues in mind.

And one big issue for, for performers is interpretation.

So a very crucial part of the study was

we would move to a piece that Casals would play

and then move to the same piece

that another child gonna play.

We, we heard Wanda L but Glen Gould,

and I don't remember the, the pianist played the same ball.

And we moved to that.

And if, I hope we have time,

because I have two different interpretations of the song.

Uh, I do wanna mention something about the swings

that summer I was just taught,

telling you about when we learned the swings,

she brought in a piece for us to move to

is the violin sonata by Elli, uh, F minor, uh,

the slow movement, which is very slow, very sad,

very beautiful, and lasts for 13 minutes.

And, uh,

she set up a v coordination on the stage.

Everybody else was moving,

but she had in particular in mind this B formation

that the two people at the wide end

of the V would swing the be, they would swing the be,

and the two people next would swing the measure.

And the two people next would swing the phrase

and the person at the eight house, the last person

will swing the entire piece, 13 minutes.

And he's sitting here, Jack, I,

and I thought I'd never forget that, and I never did.

And here we're, um,

And I, I also want to tell you about her final exams.

I don't know how much you know about the final, the Yes,

Greg just has the hallway.

Yes, the hallway. Well, what I should tell you is that one

of the most beautiful experiences I had

as a student of in town was watching movies.

I I'm getting these forms right now.

Uh, her movement was exquisite.

And whenever we saw her, Hmm.

Be like that. And, uh,

so our final plan was, uh, each one of us would play a piece

and she would go down the hallway all the way to the end.

Um, the, the group was, I remember there was a certain wall.

We were all sitting against a wall.

And one member of the group was the lookout, uh,

in the hallway and would communicate with the,

the player who was a flutist.

This was the first person who went

and, uh, she would let in know when the flutist was

ready to play.

Flutist was warming up.

And then we heard Indy yell, pull me in.

So the flutist started to play and we would wait.

And it was beautiful.

She played the sea rice spikes, Debbie, see

and end up here at the door movement.

She continued into the room moving with the music.

She moved with the peace till the end.

And it was another memorable moment in my education.

Um, each of us played for her

and she did the same thing.

Uh, there were two, I remember there were two times

she did not appear in the draw

and used that as a teaching, uh,

learning experience because we talked about it.

Uh, she never wanted to humiliate anybody or punish anybody.

And each of them had a chance to do it again.

And to learn about why she didn't appear,

why she didn't feel pulled in.

She did talk a lot about the nature of music,

the forces, what she called magnetic forces.

And, um, she talked about how the music wants to go

and it doesn't want to go.

And the dancers who are here know exactly what that's about.

Uh, there's this a lot of tension pulling back sometimes.

And she had us do an exercise, I'll just tell you about

where we moved through air.

We just moved through the room, through air,

and then when she clapped her hands, it returned to water.

And the next time she clapped her hands, it was mud,

and then it was walls, and then it was stone.

And she had us work with that quite a lot.

And our one great exercise was she designated

portions of the room.

You know, when you go through here, it's air.

When you go through here, it's water when you go

through there and so on.

What was very exciting was to be moving through air.

And then the people on the other side were moving

through stone at the same time.

And she did a lot of work like that, working with, uh,

tension, working with, uh, qualities in music, articulation

and energy and all that.

And it was all translated beautifully

through her, uh, designs.

Um, boy, I'm wondering what I'm leaving out here now.

I, I wrote a whole thing

and I'm just gonna look what more time,

because really like to read to you some of the stuff.

Um, boy.

Oh, I, I,

okay.

Um, anyway, I want to do an exercise with you.

Uh, what we're going to do is use the swing.

So, you know, I don't think you can do it from your seats.

Um, although if you could try

and if you feel like it, please stand up.

And the aisles come up here.

It'll be interesting if any of you wanna come up here

and move, it'll be really interesting for people

to watch the movement.

So first we're going to just try out these swings

and, um, it's just swing,

it's an arc swing

and she wants you to go somewhere

and start it with momentum.

We can use a wide momentum with a strong swing.

And you can also step somewhere.

You don't have to stay glued to the floor.

You can move your through air, but still has that momentum

and that feeling of sending it off

be, be,

be, be.

Let's do four bes be,

And we're gonna use these way

to move to two different pieces.

Well, there's the same piece with two different, uh, singers

and, uh, piano companies.

Um, you might wonder how, how are we able to do this

after we've only had, you know, a couple minutes of this.

As I said before, these swings are not

technically difficult.

And remember when I joined the class, along

with all my student friends,

we've never had any anys before.

We didn't know what it was. Uh, maybe they like me,

signed up for a true credit course or something.

But, uh, we had no experience stepping into the music.

Moving to the music. So you have all that.

So this is completely doable.

So, uh, I I will also add Inda, never,

not once did she give us a music score

for the music we were moving with.

Uh, we never saw it.

And the reason for that, she never explained it.

And we were just seniors in college,

so we didn't ask these kinds of questions.

But thinking back to it, she didn't want us to look.

She wanted us to listen and be with the music and feel it

and not have anything that would cause us to analyze

or furrow

or browse, which we would do looking at a score.

Okay, so you ready?

Two swings.

Okay. I am curious to know

if any of this, uh, if, if you kind of resonate with

what I said

before, this is the way of listening to the music.

It's really a way not just sitting and listening

and not sitting with a score, but moving in this simple way

and music moves you.

And so it's a way of learning it. She wanted us to learn it.

Music as heard. That's how we learned the music.

We, we memorized

and we were, we were

to practice this at home this way, move it.

And it was a way to learn.

What I'm curious to know is if this, you know,

it is difficult to do it once, uh, and and it's new.

Does anybody have anything they, they care

to share about that?

Yes. I just need to share one thing

because, um, we have, you

and I have such similar experiences in our eyes,

especially this one.

But you voted. I'm sitting here watching you.

I see her in,

so it's, it's quite remarkable.

I, I I, all these years you've known each other.

I haven't ever seen that.

All of a sudden these swings sort of brought back.

Oh, that's what she's doing. Yeah.

I'm, I'm glad to hear that.

That's, we all, probably all of us were here on the stage.

We would be looking like her that way

because we moved, we were compelled.

Yes. Um, not by her, but by the music and seeing her.

I'm so sorry you can't see her.

You know, there are no videotapes of her. Nothing. Nothing.

So now I, I have no idea what time it is,

but what's seven?

Seven? Okay, well

I'll tell you what I wanted to do

and see if the powers that be will allow me to do this.

I have another recording record by another artist

of the same piece.

What was that? Pardon me? What was that? Did you say?

Did you say no? What? No. Oh.

Uh, this one was Bri singing.

Um, and they're both wonderful, wonderful singers.

Um, but I have another one that I'd like you to listen to.

If we don't have time to do the whole thing, then

you can just listen to the beginning having move this one.

You, you know, you'll hear differences. How does that sound?

Yes. Wanna do that? Okay.

So I invite you to take your seats if you'd like,

or you wanna stay here?

Oh, you wanna swing? Okay.

Wants to, I'll tell

you if wants.

Alright, here's the, here's the other one.

And she didn't tell us until we all done the

Did she also swing while you were swinging?

Oh, yes. That's she, she did, she did.

So we, we imitated her.

That's why, you know, if I look like her,

because we were all in.

So it gave you insight to how she was hearing the music?

It did, it did. But it, it was still something we studied.

We, we went home and moved like that.

And who's the singer of the second one? Do you know?

Uh, I was gonna guess. No, but it

very light, you know.

Yeah. Light with the disco usually is, yes.

It's, there's recording with Herman Cry

and it's so different.

But I, these two are different also in other ways.

Um, the pianist is, well with,

with Fisher Scout, Gerald Moore.

Gerald Moore was the pianist.

And uh, lemme see the other one.

Um, Martin Marone with Brent Tur.

Completely different touch. Yes, yes. Yeah.

And swinging really swinging really get you to feel the,

the touch of the pianist and the phrasing of the voice.

It's really, no, I think the swings were very

effective in helping me listen.

And yeah, what's so interesting is that I think

of swings is, you know,

and this is a totally different Yeah, it's a different,

very different, yeah.

That those were, this ones, they went mostly they went over

because there's, there's a different under tension.

This has weight the bottom, this, you know, you have a lot

of control over this and I can feel that.

Um, what I wanted to tell you about was this song,

it's from Schubert Sean on,

and this is one called, which is farewell.

And it's somebody saying farewell to his hometown,

he's about to leave.

And all of this bumpy bump that's a little train,

uh, you know, going over the bricked rails.

That's the train. And then the other is,

I may never see.

Anyway, um, I'm sure I left a lot

because I did write something.

Maybe we'll, um, put that on the, uh, absolutely. Yeah.

If I can find it. Anyway, it's been really pleasure to,

um, be with you.

Do this. Um, I, I do know

that one comment I made that I wanna conclude was that

I didn't realize that taking this, it was just one semester

I had with her taking that one semester would lead

to decades of study, um,

uh, five decades and a career business.

And just love being here. Thank you so much.

Thank you.