Dalcroze Method

Dalcroze Method

หลักการสอนดนตรี ตามแนวคิดของ Dalcroze

Emile Jaques - Dalcroze 1865 - 1950

a Swiss composer, educator, and developed Dalcroze Education.

While teaching music at the Geneva Conservatory, he observed that his students lacked essential musical skills. They could not actually hear the music and harmonies they were writing. When they performed, their playing showed little sense of rhythmic life.

• He began to devise ear training games to develop better inner hearing. These games honed the students’ perceptions and resulted in more sensitive music-making: timing, articulation, tone quality, and phrase shape.

• Dalcroze noticed his students would exhibit subtle, spontaneous movements – swaying, tapping a foot, a slight swinging of the arms – as they sang. The body was conscious of the life and movement of the music.

Dalcroze began to explore these natural, instinctive gestures. He invited students to walk and swing their arms, or to conduct while they sang or listened to him improvise at the piano. He called this study of music through movement “eurhythmics,” from the Greek roots “eu” and “rythmos” meaning “good flow.”

Dalcroze continued to experiment with eurhythmics, giving demonstrations of his "Rhythmic Gymnastics" throughout Switzerland and Western Europe. In 1911, he founded a school in Hellerau, Germany, where he refined his pedagogical methods and mounted innovative theatrical productions informed by these newly developed aesthetic principles.

Dalcroze Education is divided into three main categories:

• Eurhythmics engages the body in rhythmic movement and active listening

• Solfège develops internal melody and harmony, along with a holistic response to musical notation

• Improvisation brings out the creative spirit with the voice, an instrument, or the body