Mu& in educatiorz
enough. With their capacity to mimic and copy, they can, like monkeys,
immediately capture the style and quality of a movement. They can
therefore enter wholeheartedly into the experience. Adolescents and
adults are slower because their attention is distracted by self-ques-
tioning. They are not so sensitive in terms of feeling nor so acute in
observation. They see some part of the action and may hear the music,
but for one reason or another their seeing and hearing is incomplete.
Children are able to pick out the rhythmical elements which compose
the movement and to capture these elements in a rhythmical way in
their subsequent actions. The attention of adults has to be directed to
the important elements; that is to say, they have to be warned what
to look at and what to listen for.
The training of the eye to observe rhythm in movement is largely
a matter of practice; the development of response to music is a little
more complicated for we have to deal with two distinct senses: one,
the sound heard through the ear, and the other the rhythmic pulsation
of sound felt through the solar plexus. Both these senses have to be
used in conjunction. In the primitive-the child or the natural dancer-
they are intermingled in a balanced way. That is to say, the child will
feel the rhythm and hear the musical structure, and these will jointly
condition the response. Another advantage possessed by the child is
that his body and limbs are still fluid and his response in pulsation will
appear as an undulation. In sharp contrast, the average adult endea-
vours to express his picture of the movement as actions of the limbs
working separately from the joints, moze in the nature of a mechanism
than an organism.
Exceptional people feel rhythm very strongly. They have not lost
the childlike or primitive feeling for a complete experience. Another
type of person who is all too common, and, in my opinion is growing
even commoner, is one who is bothered by a number of difficulties
of his own creation and who is distracted away from the main artistic
end. The most difficult to deal with is the intellectual person who seeks
to analyse movement by fastening on to some points of mechanical
detail. Such semi-scientific approach to folk music is curiously ineffec-
tive in artistic expression, particularly in the case of dance. The success-
ful leader of audience participation must be aware of and experienced
in these difficulties. Those who are particularly concerned with music
and dance will find they share a common problem with teachers of
other kinds of art. Whatever the form of art, the broad totality of
artistic experience must somehow be imparted while it is red hot,
before feeling is starved and weakened by conscious inquiry into detail.