The Eurhythmics of Jaques-Dalcroze | Page 5

addition that the music which lives within them--artists will understand me--should obtain free and complete development, and that the rhythms which inspire their personality should enter into intimate communion with those which animate the works to be interpreted.
The education of the nervous system must be of such a nature that the suggested rhythms of a work of art induce in the individual analogous vibrations, produce a powerful reaction in him and change naturally into rhythms of expression. In simpler language, the body must become capable of responding to artistic rhythms and of realizing them quite naturally without fear of exaggeration.
This faculty of emotion, indispensable to the artist, was formerly natural to almost all beginners in music, for hardly any but pre-destined artists devoted themselves to the art; but, if this is no longer the case, it is possible at least to awaken dulled faculties, to develop and co-ordinate them, and it is the duty of every musical educationalist to deter from instrumental technique every individual who is still without musical feeling.
The experimental study of rhythm should form a part of every well-organized musical education, and this study will be useful not only to musicians, but to music itself. It is quite certain that, if since Beethoven's time harmony has developed, if each generation has created fresh groupings of sounds, it is not the same regarding rhythmic forms, which remain much as they were.
I shall be told that the means of expression are of no importance so long as the artist is able to show his meaning, that a sincere emotion can be clearly expressed even with old-fashioned rhythms, and that to try and create new rhythms is mere technical work, and to enforce such upon the composers of to-morrow is simply depriving them of their character. This is all true, and I myself have a horror of seeking new means of expression within the limits of hard and fast rules, for expression ought to be a spontaneous manifestation. But I assert that experiments in rhythm, and the complete study of movements simple and combined, ought to create a fresh mentality, that artists thus trained will find inevitably and spontaneously new rhythmic forms to express their feelings, and that in consequence their characters will be able to develop more completely and with greater strength. It is a fact that very young children taught by my method invent quite naturally physical rhythms such as would have occurred to very few professional musicians, and that my most advanced pupils find monotonous many contemporary works the rhythmic poverty of which shocks neither public nor critics.
I will terminate this short sketch of my system by pointing out the intimate relations which exist between movements in time and movements in space, between rhythms in sound and rhythm in the body, between Music and Plastic Expression.
Gestures and attitudes of the body complete, animate and enliven any rhythmic music written simply and naturally without special regard to tone, and, just as in painting there exist side by side a school of the nude and a school of landscape, so in music there may be developed, side by side, plastic music and music pure and simple. In the school of landscape painting emotion is created entirely by combinations of moving light and by the rhythms thus caused. In the school of the nude, which pictures the many shades of expression of the human body, the artist tries to show the human soul as expressed by physical forms, enlivened by the emotions of the moment, and at the same time the characteristics suitable to the individual and his race, such as they appear through momentary physical modifications.
In the same way, plastic music will picture human feelings expressed by gesture and will model its sound forms on those of rhythms derived directly from expressive movements of the human body.
To compose the music which the Greeks appear to have realized, and for which Goethe and Schiller hoped, musicians must have acquired experience of physical movements; this, however, is certainly not the case to-day, for music has become beyond all others an intellectual art. While awaiting this transformation, present generations can apply education by and for rhythm to the interpretation of plastic stage music such as Richard Wagner has imagined. At the present day this music is not interpreted at all, for dramatic singers, stage managers and conductors do not understand the relation existing between gesture and music, and the absolute ignorance regarding plastic expression which characterizes the lyric actors of our day is a real profanation of scenic musical art. Not only are singers allowed to walk and gesticulate on the stage without paying any attention to the time, but also no shade of expression, dynamic or motor, of the orchestra--crescendo, decrescendo, accelerando, rallentando--finds in their gestures adequate realization. By this I