“All musical truth resides in the body.”
Dalcroze Education offers a hands-on approach to music theory in which students explore musical concepts such as meter, tempo, phrasing, form, and dynamics through rhythm games, creative movement, songs, stories, ear training, sight-singing, and improvisation. Students are brought into the music through personal and physical experience, sequentially feeling, identifying, vocalizing, and finally applying to instruments.
A Dalcroze Eurhythmics introduction and demonstration with Lisa Parker, director of the Dalcroze Eurhythmics program at the Longy School of Music in Cambridge, MA.
In this Dalcroze Eurhythmics quick reaction game students learn to internalize tempo quickly when they are asked to jump so that they land on the fourth note that is played. It is taught by Dr. Gregory Ristow.
“In the process of responding to what we hear we learn about music, we learn about ourselves, we learn to interact with other people, we’re creating, we’re inventing...”
In this Dalcroze Eurhythmics game taught by Dr. Gregory Ristow, students learn to predict and be sensitive to phrase lengths when they are asked to walk when the music plays, and clap during the silence.
In this fast-paced Dalcroze Eurhythmics game taught by Dr. Gregory Ristow, students learn to listen actively for musical cues as they skip in a circle.
“We must never forget that music is movement,
always going somewhere, shifting and changing,
and flowing, from one note to another;
and that movement can tell us more about the way we feel than a million words can.”
A Dalcroze Eurhythmics class for children with Anne Farber at the Lucy Moses School, New York City.
Empowering through Rhythm with Dr. Eric Barnhill, a Juilliard-trained concert pianist and the creator of Cognitive Eurhythmics music movement therapy.
“Music is the sole domain in which man realizes the present.”
A 1966 demonstration by John Colman who was a student of Emile Jaques-Dalcroze.
Dalcroze teaching in dance school. Video by FIER International Federation of Eurhythmics Teachers.