What is Dalcroze?

Dalcroze education offers an experiential way of teaching and learning music through purposeful movement. Playful yet rigorous in approach, it provides a process for awakening, developing, and refining innate musicality through three core branches of study:

1. Eurhythmics provides training in structural elements (beat, rhythm, meter, texture, phrase, and form) and aesthetic elements (dynamics, nuance, articulation, and affect). As students gain control of their bodies, they become freer to express themselves creatively in both movement and music.
2. Solfège trains the eyes, ears, and voice, enabling a student to listen to music and transcribe it onto paper, and to look at sheet music and hear it internally without the use of an instrument.
3. Improvisation enables students to create music instrumentally or vocally, usually beginning with movement or vocalization to facilitate the creative process. Bodily gestures relate to gestures used at the instrument, clarifying connections between movement and music.

What is Dalcroze Education?

The Dalcroze philosophy of musical education helps to make music more vivid for students of all ages and levels, from young beginners through adult professionals. Using movement and gesture, Dalcroze practitioners create activities and exercises that help students learn to trust their ideas and develop their own intuitions.

When experiencing a Dalcroze class, participants begin to feel, express, and master the flow that is essential to music, dance, and the other performing arts. When paired with private music lessons, Dalcroze education can promote deep learning for musicians of all ages and levels.

Dalcroze education is one of the first modern methods of music education and was developed with adult pre-professional students at the Conservatoire de Genève by Émile Jaques-Dalcroze (1865-1950), a Swiss composer, philosopher, educator, and concert pianist. Today, his revolutionary ideas about education continue to be confirmed by scientific research. Besides music, the Dalcroze method has been applied to professionals in many other disciplines, including dancers, actors, music therapists, occupational therapists, architects, and senior citizens.

What Are the Benefits of a Dalcroze Education?

Dalcroze education provides a rich, complex, multifaceted practice that encourages each of us to develop our artistic voice and at the same time develop interactive ensemble skills.

Dalcroze education is a key part of the curriculum at leading institutions, K-12 to collegiate, around the world. Even from an early age children in Dalcroze classes develop critical listening, motor, and social skills. Participants often remark that the practice is intuitive, and it can also inspire musicians of all ages and levels to reach for higher levels of performance. Dalcroze can help deepen musical understanding and improve kinesthetic awareness. 

For musicians, Dalcroze can:

• Foster an organic understanding of musical concepts through the body
• Nurture expressive performance – alive with flow, vitality, and nuance
• Promote an aesthetic education in music, especially through Plastique Animée
• Develop a more intuitive way of knowing rhythm, meter, phrase, form, and structure
• Improve our ability to listen internally
• Cultivate our sense of pitch function in combination with absolute pitch names
• Expand our harmonic vocabulary and inform our knowledge of counterpoint
• Increase coordination and independence in both gross and fine motricity
• Stimulate creativity and improvisation, offering new pathways to conceive of music as a language

For dancers, Dalcroze can:

• Offer new ways of knowing essential musical concepts
• Develop a more meaningful relationship with music notation
• Refine non-verbal expression
• Encourage aesthetic development
• Create new pathways to understand the relationship among time, space, energy along with weight and flow
• Improve coordination and independence of limbs

As a therapy for senior citizens, Dalcroze can:

• Improve mobility, coordination, and balance
• Enhance cognitive skills
• Strengthen memory function
• Maintain and develop oral communication abilities
• Mitigate falls and other injuries
• Encourage social interaction and foster a sense of community

Who Can Benefit from a Dalcroze Education?

The Dalcroze approach can provide benefits for:

• Children from birth through elementary school
• Young adults from middle school through high school
• Adults including:
  • Professional musicians
  • Professional dancers
  • Teaching artists
  • Performers
  • Composers
  • Actors
  • Occupational therapists
  • Music therapists
  • Architects
  • Non-professional musicians and dancers
  • Senior citizens
  • People with disabilities or special needs

What to Expect in a Dalcroze Eurhythmics Class

Every Dalcroze eurhythmics class is unique; there is no one form, structure, or recipe.

However, it is common for the students to respond to the music they hear through movement. The teacher is often creating this music at the piano, responding to the students’ needs and guiding them through their improvisation. The movement is most often locomotor, but can also be gestural, depending on the activity. Typically, these classes are done in a group, and students are often asked to interact with one another based on the activities suggested by the instructor. While the orchestral nature of the piano makes it ideal for many activities, other music may also be used. Dalcrozians often use percussion, drums, vocal music, recorded music, and/or the use of other solo instruments (violin, flute, cello, etc.).

Ideally, movement is in bare feet. This is for both for safety and for stimulus. Using bare feet allows for the movers to have better balance and control but it also allows them to feel the floor and thereby receive direct feedback with every step. Students will experience many different types of activities motivated by the improvisation of the instructor.

As the class unfolds, students discover the goals and intentions of the lesson by experiencing each activity. Objectives usually not announced at the onset of each activity, rather they are discovered through the activity and at the end of the lesson. In this way, change is the only constant in a Dalcroze class!

The teacher shapes the music to support guidelines of the activity, and to what they observe the students doing. The students, in turn, shape the performance based on the nature of the music, adjusting to tempo, dynamics, texture, phrase structure, and style. Eventually, the teacher leads the students to understand the objectives of the exercises, and this often culminates in a piece of music or movement experience that helps to connect the various activities and deepen the movers’ understanding of the material.

No Dalcroze educator is alike, and no class is like any other. The Dalcroze approach allows for incredible variety in teaching styles and methods. There are many different and unique ways that Dalcroze educators have used this approach to lead students to discover how they can embody music. However, they use the 10 principles of the method to guide their teaching.

To call themselves a Dalcroze teacher or offer Dalcroze coursework, all Dalcroze practitioners must have Dalcroze Professional Certificate (or equivalent), granted by a Diplômé who is responsible for their training. Dalcroze practitioners work in conservatories, universities, public and private schools, early childhood programs, and private studios. Due to the intensive training process and the many sophisticated skills required to be a Dalcroze educator, the number of teachers with the Dalcroze Professional Certificate remains small, but their impact on music education is significant.