Music and Movement

November 14, 2019

All musical truth resides in the body.
ÉMILE JAQUES-DALCROZE

As a piano teaching philosophy, Eurhythmics helps a student to physically experience musical rhythms and movements, so they are not just intellectually understood, but physically experienced. The body serves as an interpreter of musical rhythm, meter, melody and dynamics: Music becomes a full-body experience. The student can then more ably apply those musical concepts to their piano playing experience.

A child's body instinctively possesses the essential element of rhythm, which is a sense of time.
ÉMILE JAQUES-DALCROZE

The beats of a heart convey a clear sense of time, breathing offers a division of time, and thus walking is a model of measure and division of time into equal parts. Walking becomes a natural beginning to the child's initiation into an understanding of rhythm through feeling.

Music acts on the whole of the organism like a magic force which suppresses the understanding and irresistibly takes possession of the entire being. To insist on analyzing this force is to destroy its very essence.

ÉMILE JAQUES-DALCROZE