Mu& itz educatiorr
the pattern. It was this which Dalcroze sensed in his first experimental
lesson when he made his pupils march to give them the clear-cut
coherent sense of living rhythm, which was to be the basis for the
whole of his study of musical rhythm as a reflection of the static and
dynamic powers of our bodies.
That there is a mysterious link between music and its rhythm, none
will venture to doubt. Everyone knows that even the simplest melody
depends entirely on its rhythm and the whole effect is altered if the
relative values of the notes are changed or the stresses shifted. But the
exact nature of the link remains a mystery, because so far no-one has
been able to explain what music means to us and what physical and
psychological laws it must obey to seem right to us. Here sensibility
can help through the medium of eurhythmics, but it is difficult to see
how sensibility can play a decisive role when one is dealing with pure
rhythm. That is why it is dangerous to overdo exercises where only
percussion instruments are used. In those cases something essential is
lacking, since pure rhythm, though it acts powerfully on the emotions,
always stirs the most primitive of these: to use Jung’s expression, it
shows a return to archaic feelings and sensibility.
The fully developed sensibility that music creates in us can only find
physical expression in gestures which become a ‘dance’. It is here that
a misunderstanding has frequently arisen. Seeing men-or more often
women-trained in eurhythmics endeavouring to give bodily expression
to their feeling for a particular piece of music, people have judged
their efforts and performances as though it were a question of a school
of dancing. That is a great mistake.
In my view, bodily movement, of whatever kind, can in no case
express music fully; music has its own inner life and can use no means
but its own. While gesture can give rhythm its fullvalue-since rhythm
by its very nature is physical-it is quite incapable of directly ex-
pressing strictly musical elements, such as the relation of the dominant
to the tonic, to mention only the simplest example. Dancing is there-
fore the transposition into another art of the impression a piece of
music makes on us; and rhythm alone is common to both these arts.
In dancing proper, we have an art which grafts itself on to another
and combines with it to please eye and ear simultaneously, or even
more, perhaps, to gratify our bodily senses in general: when we follow
a dance with our eyes, we perform it ourselves in imagination just as
we do when we hear a piece of music.
In eurhythmics, the expressive, ballet-like gesture usually has no
other object than to enable the student to show his understanding of