Jouer autrement : les exercices d’Émile Jaques-Dalcroze

Abstract

Dalcrozian Rhythmics constitutes a set of exercises building up progressively, aiming at a feeling and experiencing of music prior to knowing it. By his Rhythmics, Émile Jaques-Dalcroze (1865 - 1950) contributed to inventing a new manner of playing. Confronted with « arrhythmia » in his pupils, he was led to renew musical education. In revitalizing this pedagogy, he freed it from the predominance of optics and writing for the benefit of a teaching focusing on the globally moving body: the relationship with listening became central in his approach. With Rhythmics, Dalcroze discovered and implemented a field of experience underrated and neglected before him, a field intrinsically connected to feeling and spontaneous movement which, for his part, the psychologist Erwin Straus (1891-1975) came to explore at a phenomenological level.

Keywords

• space
• playing
• movement
• rhythmics
• feeling
• Émile Jaques-Dalcroze