Music in educationirresistible urge to interpret it by more or less primitive gestures, steps
or dances.
That was something Jaques-Dalcroze did not overlook. It is there-
fore during childhood that this training takes its natural place alongside
the other mental and bodily disciplines; properly taught it can have
the happiest effects on the mental and physical well-being of the young.
So far I have hardly mentioned music except as the essential basis of
eurhythmics. As a composer, I feel that I must now briefly consider
the part played by the eurhythmics of Dalcroze and its future influence
in the teaching of music, that is, its contribution to the art of music.
To begin with the conclusion, it should be said that Jaques-Dalcroze’s
researches on musical rhythm have proved of considerable importance.
He was the first to re-examine the basic dogma of our Western music-
the invariable length of the measure and its corollary, the principle that
rhythm is to be created only by the division of the measure into equal
fractional parts of a whole note.
He also explored, indefatigably, the polyrhythmic methods of the
Far East and his researches have given composers new resources and
infinite possibilities through the mingling and fusing of the two basic
rhythmic methods. These they have not failed to use and, frankly, to
abuse. Measures of unequal length and the mingling of measures in
3/s, 4/8, 5/6 and 7/s time have become a commonplace of contemporary
composition, and in most cases create utterly pointless difficulties in
performance. It is however the inevitable fate of every new discovery
and every relaxation of restraint to let in folly and encourage anarchy.
I am always astonished to see harmony and counterpoint carefully
taught and cultivated in all schools of music while the student composer
is left to do just as he likes about rhythm. I suspect that the explanation
lies in the fact that all our musical teaching revolves round the poly-
phonic writing of the eighteenth century and the symphonic writing
of the early nineteenth. In pure polyphony, the use of the measure
divided into three or four parts is almost indispensable. In this type of
music the rhythm must be very simple, or else it becomes inextricably
complicated. It is none the less true that in the subject of a fugue, for
instance, the rhythm is at least as important as the position of the notes
and that the rhythmic relationship between subject and counter-subject
is absolutely decisive for the clarity of the counterpoint. This gap in
present-day teaching is frequently brought home to me when I find
students of composition with an advanced knowledge of harmony and
counterpoint incapable, from mere rhythmic clumsiness, of keeping
the individual parts distinct.