Dalcroze Eurythmics

There's one great exercise that's a lot of fun where you can lay your thighs across the floor and play a tune on the piano. And in between the ropes exists the beat so I would jump over the thighs to feel the pulse. One of the hardest things in music is teaching students to play expressively The Dalcrose approach, using gesture and movement, can be a rich source of practical ideas to help students make better music. Music can be a hard subject to teach because, as music teachers, we're very enthusiastic about music and we want to transmit that enthusiasm to the students. But sometimes the students may have problems believing that they can do it and they can achieve it with music. Thinking back to when I was at school, what I felt was hard for the teacher was to capture the interest of those who are not switched on by music and also to keep the interest of those who have already been learning an instrument since they were six or seven. Music's hard to teach if you don't know very much about it. You need to be a good musician, you need to know how to teach that subject as well and how to help students or pupils discover it. You're not just telling them things, you're trying to give them an experience. As part of her work at the Royal Northern College of Music, Karen Greenhead teaches Dalcrose Eurythmics to PGCE students. It's an approach to music teaching that harnesses the natural rhythms of body movement. Here at the Royal Northern College of Music, I have students on a two-year PGCE course. In addition to get string pedagogy, Dalcrose Eurythmics, improvisation and solfa and teaching practice. So you're going to create a little sequence for yourself and accompany it with your voice. Emile Jack Dalcrose noticed that people spontaneously swayed or tapped their feet when they heard music and he started devising exercises to train the natural human response to music. Dalcrose Eurythmics is a tripartite method, it's not just one thing. It is rhythmics, improvisation and solfa. You should find all three present in any one lesson but the thing that's completely unique to Dalcrose is the rhythmics class which is why so many people think that's all it is, well it isn't. I very often use materials such as the rhythmic gymnastics balls because they give feedback to the person who's using them and the sense of rebound is very very important in playing because it's part of what's what gives you a good tone. It's really holistic, the way it looks at music as movement, as singing, as improvisation, all the three parts they come into one. We found that things became freer, we could express phrases more easily, there was more of a flow in what we were doing because we were taking it away from dots on the page. All right, I like that. A lot of them have been taught to play technically and a lot of them think of it as fingers. Their own inner feeling about music may have been neglected completely. When the students come to work with the children sometimes they they're shocked because they find the children can do things that they can't. As part of their PGCE course, students go to Chorlton High School to observe children from the Manchester Youth Strings Project taking Eurythmics and Solfar lessons. The Solfar teacher works with them mainly on the pitch and the Rhythmics teacher works with them mainly on the movement but they will sing and do pitch related things within the movement class and they also move in the Solfar, they're not just sitting down. That's why they're engaged all the time because their whole body is constantly engaged in what they're doing. I had introduced some work with rests and they were clapping the rest. Then we had, can you step the rhythm and clap the missing beats? That means that their brain is getting a much stronger signal about what it all is because more bits of their body are being used in doing it. And then I played different patterns with different amounts of silence and they had to measure out how much silence there was. They're taking responsibility for a lot of their own learning. There's a lot of them taking ownership of what they're doing and so it's very empowering. Then maybe it's not just sound and silence, maybe it's two different paths, maybe it's treble and bass. And they were in pairs, the child with the drum is only moving on the bass and the child who taps, taps what I play in the treble. And I wanted to do this because I want to teach them to hear into the texture of the music and not just the top tune. Especially players of upper instruments like flutes and violins, they're so attuned to the treble sound they don't necessarily really hear what's going on underneath. That's fatal in the string quartet. That's the top part, what's going on underneath? From the teacher's point of view, I could say it's amazingly hard work because you have to be 200% present. But it's also endlessly fascinating. It's the most completely creative way to teach that you could have. Practising the Dalcroze approach in its purest form requires space for the movement exercises which may not be available in a mainstream school environment. Backup and Rothenstall School has a very positive approach to music and is taking part in National Music Week with many events around the school. Head of Music Joanne Tierney is enthusiastic about Dalcroze but how has she applied it in the classroom? Rather than follow the Dalcroze approach to the letter I take elements of the things that I studied at college and I incorporate them into the lessons where I can. I would have a beat on in the background or I would clap the register. Often I would use very sort of interactive starters. Then we went on to a singing activity which looked at rhythm and pulse. And this was to see if we could both clap the rhythm independently and also clap the pulse. Then I wanted them to get a feeling of what it was like to have a steady pulse whilst they were clapping the rhythm so that's why I got them into pairs. And then I had them reciting note values and we used drinks names for that. I gave out some cards which had note values written on them and they arranged them. They picked out eight that they wanted to include and then one person clapped a steady beat whilst the rest of them said the rhythm using the drinks names. They came up with a short piece of audio percussion that showed what their rhythm was whilst one person kept the beat. I wanted them to do that to get some experience of working in groups together to get experience of coordinating their movements of looking and watching each other to get a good feeling of what crotchets and quavers feel like. And then after that we went around in a circle and they all improvised their own clapping pattern. They had to sort of listen to the beat and you know listen to when their time was up and I was helping them out as well by counting up to eight. By the end of it they'd improvised a pattern of body percussion by themselves. Excellent. Now that you can improvise your own rhythm using what we call body percussion you'll be able to improvise your own rhythm using instruments as well. Okay. As a teacher of Darkrose Eurythmics you are improvising, composing, inventing, interpreting all the time in your own lesson. So it makes the teacher a much more creative type of person. A lot of people despise teaching. They come into college thinking I'm going to be a player but usually once they've done this they actually aim to. I went for two years to the Darkrose Institute to gain a license and came back and I decided I wouldn't pursue a career as a violinist. I wanted to give my time to look at teaching this method and also look at how I could apply this method to teaching the violin. Beth and James works with the Manchester Youth String Orchestra coaching the students using Darkrose Eurythmics to improve the expression in their playing. Look at these things physically. But I think it can be applied to any ability and at any age. It just depends how flexible you can be as a teacher I suppose and see the potential of each exercise and adapt them. You have basic principles and with those principles you create your lesson rather than opening a book and there is a lesson for you. That makes it a very rich experience and that's why every Darkrose teacher teaches in a different way. The exercises I chose to do were invented for last night. They weren't things that I've ever tried out before. Dynamics is something that I feel you cannot really learn by simply sitting still because it's to do with energy. The aim was for them to experience a surge of energy as they travelled. Another musical element that I wanted to work on was the on and the off beat and accents that happens all throughout the piece. I wanted to play only the quavers that I've called out. By using the chopsticks they weren't just clapping themselves they had an object by which they had to place it in the correct place at the right time. Making them work in pairs made them focus a bit more because they had responsibility to do it right for their partner. In terms of trying it out with a class I would just say give it a go see whether the class enjoys it and see whether you get an enjoyment out of teaching. Through moving we can all communicate a lot better our feelings about music so I basically say if you're sceptical about the method try it and make time and space to try it in school. Some students may be of the opinion that if they haven't had private lessons on an instrument that they can't do music so the challenge is to try and to motivate them to say well no you can do that and here's how you can do this. Your instrument isn't played by a disembodied brain it's played by your body so the information that comes through you to the instrument has to come through your nerves, muscles, touch guided by your ear, your sense of rhythm. Instrument doesn't just play by itself.