Music in eduationand in the autumn began the teaching of it. It was the start of a
wonderful adventure.’
In working out his system Jaques-Dalcroze began without pre-
conceived ideas. He definitely did not regard it as dancing nor was he
trying to create a new art or a new discipline. But, as a teacher of sol-
fa, he had found that his pupils had little sense of musical rhythm,
which they created artificially by adding up the note values, and he
had also remarked that children had this natural musical rhythm ‘in
their bones’, in their walk, in running and in the movement of their
arms. His idea was to use these innate faculties to develop a sensitive-
ness that would no longer be artificial but genuine. Originally at any
rate, all his investigations were conducted solely with music-making
in mind.
However, the results he obtained led him little by little to expand
his system and convert it into a kind of general auxiliary to the intel-
lectual, artistic or athletic disciplines which he rightly regarded as
being essentially specialized, each calling into play only a limited
number of our faculties.
Thus eurhythmics does not claim to be a substitute for any other
subject; it seeks to be ancillary only.
Evolved as it was from the teaching of sol-fa, and invented by a
composer, eurhythmics took music as its primary component; and I
mean music and not musical rhythm as is too often supposed. In this
it is at one with the best models of bygone civilizations more synthe-
tical and thereby more humane than our own-the civilization of
Greece springs first to mind and also that of ancient China. The study
of music, then, is an intimate part of eurhythmics, but it is not a
question of technical study, like learning to sing or play an instrument,
with a view to performance, or studying harmony or counterpoint so
as to be able to compose: here the aim is not to make music but to
listen to it properly, to experience it directly. Accordingly the ear must
be trained by the practice of sol-fa, and listening must be cultivated
in all its forms-tone, volume and rhythm. The rhythmic gymnastics
of Jaques-Dalcroze lose their most intimate meaning unless they are
accompanied by a thorough study of sol-fa. It is clear that unless
musical perception has first been developed, there can be no possi-
bility of making music the prime component and cultural basis of this
form of training. If the pupil does not know how to listen to music,
he will revert to a kind of primitive stage at which the only thing that
matters is rhythm as such, combined with bodily movement. That is
how eurhythmics is often represented and also, unfortunately, how it