Articles about Dalcroze pedagogy organized by age.
Early Childhood:
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Register And Scale
Translating musical phenomena into verbal language can be tricky. Most adults are familiar with the use of the words high and low as applied to musical pitch. Specifically, these words refer to the frequency of the musical tone: higher tones have a more frequent wavelength than lower tones. When physicalizing these concepts, we take advantage…
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Phrasing
A phrase can best be described as a musical sentence. Phrases can be long, extending over many bars, or as short as a few beats. Just like a spoken sentence, phrases are often separated by a breath, or at least the sense of one. The ends of musical phrases can imply the punctuation of a…
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Leading and Following
Because music is often a social activity, the Dalcroze classroom is a great opportunity for kids to experiment with roles that will also be important for them as they move through life. From early childhood on, I like to give them experiences of leading, following, working with a partner and being a member of a…
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A Basic Structure for 4-5 year-old Dalcroze Classes
Hello Lucy Moses Summer Intensive 2013 participants, and anyone else interested teaching music to young children! As requested, here is an outline of the structure I use for my classes for young children. Though I do follow this basic plan for most of my classes, this represents only what works for me – there are…
Early elementary:
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7-9 Year-Old Dalcroze, 11/15/16
This weeks activities: Move to the music. At signal, stop and clap 4 times. At next signal, stop and pat knees 4 times. Continue to alternate at each signal. This is a continuation of the same game we played last week, with an added challenge: keeping track of a past event. 1 voice/2 voices: walk…
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7-9 Year-old Dalcroze: 11/22/16
7-9 Year-old Dalcroze; 11/22/16 Make a shape with curves. Make a shape with straight lines. This seemingly simple direction was first intended to be a physical warm-up. As I watched their choices, I began to play accompanying chords: towards dissonance for the curvy, and towards consonant for the straight-line shapes. After a time, I stopped…
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7-9 Year-old Dalcroze: 12/6/16
Back Telephone The traditional game of telephone (whisper a phrase around the circle and see if it comes back the same) only with rhythms gently tapped on the back. We tried 2 rhythms and both came back perfectly. I used the second rhythm to introduce the 4 sixteenth note rhythm (known at Lucy Moses as…
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7-9 Dalcroze: 12/14/16
Here’s what we did: All move freely; I choose one person’s movement to play after which the class guesses who I was playing. This was by request. I like this game because it encourages the kids to move in their own way. Make a shape with 3 or 4 people. Simple instructions, but took them…
Late elementary:
Adult
note: during the pandemic, when we were looking for ways to keep ourselves moving, I made some posts for adults to practice their eurhythmics skills. For more about teaching Dalcroze to adults, view ‘by subject‘.
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Amphibrach: Augmentation and Diminution
Read more: Amphibrach: Augmentation and DiminutionWell, if that isn’t the most wonky title for a blog post… It’s less fancy than it sounds. This is an augmentation/diminution activity for the “amphribrach” rhythm, sometimes called “syn-co-pa”. In 4/4, the rhythm could be written quarter-half-quarter. (The rhythm could be notated in any simple duple or quadruple meter, like 4/4, 2/2, 2/4, 4.8,…
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5
Read more : 5Measures of 5 are most often broken up into groups of 3’s and 2’s. (The classic model is Brubeck’s “Take Five”.) In this activity, I play with length and placement of those groupings. The simplest way to interact with the recording here would simply be to keep track of 1 within the measure of 5…
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Quadruple and Triple Time
Read more: Quadruple and Triple TimeAnother reaction game, this time with a musical signal. You will hear music in a meter of 4 (e.g. 4/4). If you hear a division of 3 on the 4th beat, the next measure will be in a meter of 3 (e.g. 3/4), for one measure only. There are many possible ways to interact with…
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Beat-Division-Multiple Series in 4/4
Read more: Beat-Division-Multiple Series in 4/4Here’s the series we did at the end of today’s drop-in class. It is somewhat of a classic. It’s in simple quadruple time (for example, 4/4). One measure of beats, one measure twice as fast, another measure of beats, one measure twice as slow. In 4/4, then, it would be 4 quarters/8 eighths/4 quarter/2 half…
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Divisions of 12
Read more: Divisions of 12To warm up for this one today I let a gesture or movement unfold as slowly as possible until it reached its limit. I tried to wait until I was really ready to begin a new one. I sometimes resisted an impulse or two so that I could really listen to what my body wanted…