Choral rehearsal using Dalcroze approaches … er, what? (Part I)

I am halfway through a Master of Music degree in choral conducting, and partway into a Licence in Dalcroze Eurhythmics. My plan over the next six months is to carry out and write up a research project integrating Dalcroze into a series of choral rehearsals, culminating in a traditional concert performance.

For most people this begs the question: “What is Dalcroze Eurhythmics?” Actually most people glaze over slightly and look lost, but I’m going to assume you asked the question.

I’m not just talking about unfamiliarity amongst the general public. Even amongst musicians and music educators it is not well-known like the Suzuki method, nor is it often read about in music education methods classes, like the Kodály approach.

To add to the confusion, the name Dalcroze Eurhythmics also has an unfortunate similarity to the 80′s band and to Steiner eurythmy (and it doesn’t help that Steiner eurythmy superficially resembles a Dalcroze activity known as plastique animée, also developed in the first two decades of the 20th century).

Muddying the waters yet further, while a search on youtube for ‘Dalcroze eurhythmics’ gives about 65 hits, very few would be recognised as representative or of good quality (this 1966 lesson with John Colman is a welcome exception) by Dalcroze practitioners. Most either bear no resemblance to what I recognise as Dalcroze, or seem to have understood the principles poorly, or are accompanied by no useful explanation – making them useless for the viewer, as it’s almost impossible to work out what’s going on and why.

The approach is frequently misunderstood when it is talked or read about rather than experienced. Fortunately there is at least one useful video online, presently hosted by the website of my Edinburgh-based friend and colleague Monica Wilkinson. The Dalcroze Society UK gives this brief summary:

“In Dalcroze Eurhythmics, virtually every musical concept is taught and experienced through movement of all parts of the body. This is a very effective way to enhance musicianship as well as improving co-ordination, concentration and other skills needed to be a good performer. This in turn increases confidence and the ability to feel music with the whole body, allowing development of auditory memory, communication, expression and creativity.”

In a nutshell, there are three essential parts to Dalcroze, without any one of which it is not Dalcroze. They are improvisation, solfège (aural training) and rhythmics (this shorter version of ‘eurhythmics’ is more commonly used). It is not necessary for each session to contain all three, but over the length of a course all three parts will be present. There is a longer description (well worth reading – you’ll also find information on the originator, Émile Jaques-Dalcroze) on the Dalcroze Society of America website and some interesting articles here.

By this point most people have reached the conclusion that the Dalcroze approach uses movement to teach basic concepts. There is usually an accompanying mental image of small children. While this is a place to start (without wishing to seem rude) this is incorrect. He initially designed his approach to suit his students at the Geneva Conservatoire and only later transferred it to children, for a start. A truer statement would be along these lines:

In a Dalcroze class, participants of whatever age and experience use gesture, time, space and energy to show what they hear. This may be;

• as essential and basic as pulse or melody contour;
• bouncing a ball to show metric stress;
• or it may involve stepping the rhythm of a melody in mixed, irregular metres, simultaneously showing accents, articulation and dynamics whilst also conducting the changing metres;
• or it may be the creation of a piece of plastique animée in a group, which is essentially a form of analysis in movement (more about this in a later post);
• or it may involve a small group turning a series of improvised movements into vocal noises into a fixed, composed piece of instrumental music;
• or a session focusing on perception of chords and modulations, in which students step the (changing) pulse, showing the chord within the key with a position of the hands while showing the relationship of the key to the original tonic by moving to a particular part of the room.

I could go on, but the reality is that there are as many variations of Dalcroze exercises as there are Dalcroze teachers. The common threads running through all of the examples above are involvement of the whole body, improvisation (by teacher or students or both) and constant awareness and attention.

Neurologists tell us that memory is the residue of thought (or to put it another way, “memory is as thinking does“). Most of us have experiences of being in classes or meetings of which we can remember nothing – why? Because we spent 90% of our time thinking about something else. In contrast, it’s quite hard to follow a changing pulse with your feet, while other people are also moving unpredictably in the space, while also daydreaming about something else. It’s possible, but usually not for long unless one has a particular fetish for bruises.

You’ve probably heard the expression ‘learning through doing’. You’ve probably also heard of kinaesthetic learning, or learning through the body. Most people in my experience agree with the statement that the best method of learning anything is by doing it.

This drives me up the wall. Firstly, we do not learn best by doing. ‘Doing’ or experiential learning is the only way we learn. Secondly, there is no such thing as a separate mind and body. Therefore, there is no such thing as ‘learning through the body’ – by definition, all information and experience comes through the body (see Maurice Merleau-Ponty and, more recently, Antonio Damasio). ‘Cartesian dualism’ as it is known, has proved enduringly popular, as although it has been argued against for a very long time, it is one of the founding assumptions of our education system (which has changed little since the 19th century). I’ll let that be the basis of a separate rant.

My question is not: “Will a Dalcroze approach to repertoire help a group of musicians to enjoy and gain more from the experience, and lead to a better performance?” This is not because I’m not interested in the above, or because I am intellectually uncurious and am prepared to take my own (positive but subjective) Dalcroze experiences as the gospel truth.

Rather it is the lived experience of the musicians, audience and myself that really piques my curiosity. For this reason I propose a phenomenological study, involving videotaped sessions, interviews with participants and multiple forms of self-feedback in order to gain a rich picture of what is happening both consciously and nonconsciously to all involved.

More about this in my next post.