Rebecca Trautman
Emile Jaques-Dalcroze
Methods of Elementary Music
Cassandra McMahan
March 9th, 2015
Emile Jaques-Dalcroze was a Swiss musician born in Vienna in 1865. He spent most of his life growing up in Geneva and, as an accomplished musician, was appointed to be professor of solfege and harmony at the Geneva Conservatory. While he was teaching there he observed something in his students that made him pause and think. “Dalcroze realized that his students could not actually hear the harmonies they were writing. Their sense of rhythm was only what they could perform by adding one note value to the next; there was no physical feeling of timing as it related to the dynamics of movement of the music,” (Mead, 1996). He realized that his students had a general, mechanical understanding of music, but not an expressive, musical sense to make it come together.
He then set out developing his pedagogy that would encourage great changes in the way that musical education was viewed. He emphasized the importance of movement, ear training, and improvisation. He spoke about his music education philosophy and gave many demonstrations supporting it at various conventions over several years of his life. Attending one of these conventions were the Dhorn brothers who, inspired by his philosophy, decided to build him a large school in Hellarau, Germany. This school became a center to the arts and hundreds of students came there to live and learn. At the start of World War I, the school was closed and Dalcroze moved back to Geneva where he founded the Emile Jaques-Dalcroze Institute in 1915. He continued to research music education, teach students, and inspire other educators until his death.
Dalcroze was the initiator of the idea of “movement with a mission;” a repetitive learning style that encouraged training in ear, brain, and body. He sought to accomplish this through eurhythmics, ear training, and improvisation. Dalcroze observed that the body responded naturally to music and he hoped to capitalize on that and encourage natural movement and reactions to music as he taught. “If, therefore, we have to define the rhythmic method of gymnastics, it is an easy matter to affirm that its object is to arouse and develop, by repeated exercises, the natural rhythms of the body,” (Jaques-Dalcroze, pg.3). He wanted to make a connection between natural rhythms (breathing, eating, walking) and rhythms that came from the will. He wanted his students to be able to draw on their natural knowledge of movement to respond instantly to changes in sounds and music and to be able to, in turn, create rhythms and music of their own.“When all his movements have become rhythmical, a child learns to think and to express himself rhythmically,” (Jaques-Dalcroze, pg. 106).Dalcroze put so much emphasis on this idea of the vitality of natural rhythm that he wrote: “Rhythmic gymnastics starts from the principle that the body is the inseparable ally of the mind; it affirms that body and mind should harmoniously perform their diverse functions, not only separately but simultaneously… Music, for instance, is not only the art of sound, but also that of accentuation and development in time; rhythm is not only the outcome of some intellectual process, it is a vital instinct,” (Pg. 108).
The next main idea of Dalcroze’s pedagogy is that of ear training. Children were taught scales, the function of individual tones within each scale, and different chords and their functions within a piece of music. In Dalcroze’s method “Children are taught to understand tones and semitones and their relationships in scales, songs, and musical passages,” (Music in Childhood). Dalcroze was convinced that all children could attain absolute pitch if they were repeatedly hearing things in the sense of C. He would spend a larger amount of time on the C scale, but would also require his students to have the ability to sing the other scales on perfect pitch. While teaching each of these scales, he would include hand signs to help internalize the movement of pitches through movement. Throughout his years of research and teaching, Dalcroze developed many different strategies for training the ear. “His ear-training "games" sharpened the students' perception and resulted in a more sensitive response to the musical elements of performance: timing, articulation, tone quality, phrase feeling,” (Mead, 1996).
All of these acquired skills (movement, rhythm, pitch) lead to the crux of Dalcroze’s music philosophy: improvisation. As he saw it “the voice will begin to imitate sound. Then the memory of sound movements will act on the mind and will call forth mental hearing. The ear listens to the external sound, the brain creates the inner sound, and so there comes into being the creative sense (improvisation, composition),” (pg. 107). Through movement, a child learns how to think and express himself through rhythm; in ear training they learn the function of pitches in a melody and how to apply that to their own inner sounds. The culmination of these becomes the expression of a child’s own musical sense. However, the education does not stop once a child is able to improvise. “Remember that whatever is "taught" must be met and explored over and over again in new contexts and new musical examples,” (Mead, 1996). Dalcroze emphasized a repetition of what was learned for true proficiency, and because of that our music education will still be going on throughout our lives.
Bibliography
Jaques-Dalcroze, Émile. Eurhythmics, Art, and Education. Salem, N.H: Ayer, 1985. Print.
Mead, Virginia Hoge. "More Than Mere Movement." Music Educators Journal 82.4 (1996): 38. Academic Search Premier. Web. 9 Mar. 2015.
Campbell, Patricia. Music in Childhood.