The Eurhythmics of Jaques-Dalcroze | Page 5

For the body can become a marvellous
instrument of beauty and harmony when it vibrates in tune with artistic
imagination and collaborates with creative thought. It is not enough
that, thanks to special exercises, students of music should have
corrected their faults and be no longer in danger of spoiling their
musical interpretations by their lack of physical skill and harmonious
movements; it is necessary in addition that the music which lives
within them--artists will understand me--should obtain free and
complete development, and that the rhythms which inspire their
personality should enter into intimate communion with those which
animate the works to be interpreted.
The education of the nervous system must be of such a nature that the
suggested rhythms of a work of art induce in the individual analogous
vibrations, produce a powerful reaction in him and change naturally
into rhythms of expression. In simpler language, the body must become
capable of responding to artistic rhythms and of realizing them quite
naturally without fear of exaggeration.
This faculty of emotion, indispensable to the artist, was formerly

natural to almost all beginners in music, for hardly any but pre-destined
artists devoted themselves to the art; but, if this is no longer the case, it
is possible at least to awaken dulled faculties, to develop and
co-ordinate them, and it is the duty of every musical educationalist to
deter from instrumental technique every individual who is still without
musical feeling.
The experimental study of rhythm should form a part of every
well-organized musical education, and this study will be useful not
only to musicians, but to music itself. It is quite certain that, if since
Beethoven's time harmony has developed, if each generation has
created fresh groupings of sounds, it is not the same regarding rhythmic
forms, which remain much as they were.
I shall be told that the means of expression are of no importance so
long as the artist is able to show his meaning, that a sincere emotion
can be clearly expressed even with old-fashioned rhythms, and that to
try and create new rhythms is mere technical work, and to enforce such
upon the composers of to-morrow is simply depriving them of their
character. This is all true, and I myself have a horror of seeking new
means of expression within the limits of hard and fast rules, for
expression ought to be a spontaneous manifestation. But I assert that
experiments in rhythm, and the complete study of movements simple
and combined, ought to create a fresh mentality, that artists thus trained
will find inevitably and spontaneously new rhythmic forms to express
their feelings, and that in consequence their characters will be able to
develop more completely and with greater strength. It is a fact that very
young children taught by my method invent quite naturally physical
rhythms such as would have occurred to very few professional
musicians, and that my most advanced pupils find monotonous many
contemporary works the rhythmic poverty of which shocks neither
public nor critics.
I will terminate this short sketch of my system by pointing out the
intimate relations which exist between movements in time and
movements in space, between rhythms in sound and rhythm in the body,
between Music and Plastic Expression.

Gestures and attitudes of the body complete, animate and enliven any
rhythmic music written simply and naturally without special regard to
tone, and, just as in painting there exist side by side a school of the
nude and a school of landscape, so in music there may be developed,
side by side, plastic music and music pure and simple. In the school of
landscape painting emotion is created entirely by combinations of
moving light and by the rhythms thus caused. In the school of the nude,
which pictures the many shades of expression of the human body, the
artist tries to show the human soul as expressed by physical forms,
enlivened by the emotions of the moment, and at the same time the
characteristics suitable to the individual and his race, such as they
appear through momentary physical modifications.
In the same way, plastic music will picture human feelings expressed
by gesture and will model its sound forms on those of rhythms derived
directly from expressive movements of the human body.
To compose the music which the Greeks appear to have realized, and
for which Goethe and Schiller hoped, musicians must have acquired
experience of physical movements; this, however, is certainly not the
case to-day, for music has become beyond all others an intellectual art.
While awaiting this transformation, present generations can apply
education by and for rhythm to the interpretation of plastic stage music
such as Richard Wagner has imagined. At the present day this music is
not interpreted at all, for dramatic singers, stage managers and
conductors do not understand