Articles about Dalcroze pedagogy organized by age.
Early Childhood:
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Leading and Following, Up and Down
Over the past few weeks the 4-5 year-old classes have been exploring several different aspects of musical experience that I have written about previously. Now that they are getting used to working together as part of a group, I like to give them opportunities to lead and follow. Recently gingerbread men and women have lead
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Drawing Music
For the past few weeks, you may have noticed your children leaving the classes clutching drawings. In the spring of the year, I usually begin to focus the children’s attention on ways that musical events and phenomenon can be visually represented. However, the longer I teach, the more I find myself delaying the introduction of
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Infrequently Asked Questions About Early Childhood Dalcroze Classes
Aside from one or two perennials, I don’t get asked too many questions during my Dalcroze classes for young children. With busy toddlers demanding attention, there just isn’t a lot of time for chatting. (There are one or two questions I am commonly asked. See if you can guess what they are – I’ll include
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A Class for 5-6 Year-olds
So many things can happen over the course of a Dalcroze semester that you can often get a better idea of what a class has been doing by simply describing a single class in detail. Here’s a description of a recent class of exceptional 5-6 year-old girls that I am fortunate enough to see every week.
Early elementary:
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7-9 Dalcroze: 1/10/17
Here is our first class of the New Year: If I move, students are still. When I stop, students move freely. Simple instructions (affectionately known as ‘opposite day’), but devilishly hard to execute for this age. The urge to mirror is very strong in us. I made my phrases in tempo and predictable. Each student
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7-9 year olds: 1/17/17
Spinning Kids of a certain age often like to spin when they come into a classroom. I’ll leave it to the psychologists to explain why, but sometimes I’ll start where they are. So today I began to play music that matched their spinning. I gradually changed the music and pointed out that it no longer
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7-9 Dalcroze: 1/24/17
Here are this week’s activities: Make a straight line with one hand and a circle with the other. Not easy for anyone to do, and most were not able to accomplish this. However, it allowed us to become acclimated to our temporary room which contained a large wall mirrored wall. I allowed them to look at
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7-9 Year-old Dalcroze: 1/31/17
This week, a guest poster: Laca Tines. She is a student in our methods class (you may have seen her observing), and a wonderful early childhood music teacher herself. As part of our class, she was asked to write an observation report. I thought hers was keenly observed, and asked for her permission to post
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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Subtraction
Read more: SubtractionIn the Drop-in Wednesday morning class series, I realized that I had been doing a mathematics run. The first week was about addition. The next was about division. So last week, I decided to try subtraction. (Can you guess what is coming this week?) We worked with a series of 8 beats that gradually whittled…
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Ostinato of 3 + cross-rhythms
Read more: Ostinato of 3 + cross-rhythmsAs fall approaches we begin to think of bonfires, homecoming games and ostinatos with cross-rhythms. No? Ok, me neither, but how about some ostinatos with cross-rhythms anyway? I was hoping you’d say that. I recorded a slow meditative track with an ostinato (repeating pattern) of 3 against cross-rhythms of 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5.…
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Picturing Music
Read more: Picturing MusicI’ve been thinking about representation lately. No, I don’t need a lawyer. I’m talking about how we ‘picture’ music. As an experiment last week, I asked my kids to draw a picture of rhythms we were working with during the session. I didn’t ask them to use notation. Some of them are too young to…
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One Small Step…
Read more: One Small Step…Whole and half steps are kind of like air. We tend to not pay too much attention to them unless something unexpected happens. For years they were certainly invisible to me – or rather, inaudible – unless I made a mistake in a musical passage, an easy enough thing to fix for pianists. It didn’t…
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Rough Sketch
Read more: Rough SketchConfession: I frequently have a hard time learning my own music. This is probably not uncommon for composers who primarily write music for others to perform, but I am definitely writing for myself. Lately, when I compose it is usually an attempt to personalize a musical subject that I will eventually be working with in…