Articles about Dalcroze pedagogy organized by age.
Early Childhood:
-
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…
-
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…
-
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…
-
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:
-
7-9 year-old Dalcroze: 3/21/17
What can you do with 4 spots? The question is quite open, but the kids took it in the spirit intended (uses were restricted to ways to arrange and move through them). Here are some of the ways they discovered, and questions they explored: arrange in square, step only on the spots what’s the difference…
-
7-9 year-old Dalcroze: 3/28/17
Here’s what we did: Tempo and dynamics Follow ( 2 dotted quarters, 3 eighths, 1 dotted quarter) In this classic Dalcroze exercise, the class moves a pattern through a variety of tempo and dynamics changes. The three eighths required us to develop some technique, as the students found it difficult to run for three and…
-
7-9 Year-old Dalcroze, 4/4/17
This week’s activities: We first reviewed the notation and language for some basic rhythms for compound (ternary) meter: dotted quarters, 3 eighth notes, quarter-eighth. I put the symbols on the board, and asked one student to stand in front of the one he/she wanted to hear and see moved. After this quick reaction game, I…
-
7-9 Year-old Dalcroze: April
Life caught up with me in April, so this is the first update for class activities in over a month. Here is a brief list of some of the things we have explored and games we have played over the past several weeks: Toss the bean bag on the high note. Kids hear melodic patterns in…
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‘.