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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Dalcroze: 7-9-Year-olds, 2/7/14
Back to my own observations… enjoy! Statue tag All students make a statue. One moves as long as she likes. When she stops, she makes the shape of one of the statues. That statue is free to move. This game is more fun when whoever is making someone else’s shape does not make their
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Dalcroze: 7-9-Year-olds, 2/14/17
Here’s what we did: Statue tag All students make a statue. One moves as long as she likes. When she stops, she makes the shape of one of the statues. That statue is free to move. This game is more fun when whoever is making someone else’s shape does not make their shape directly in
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7-9 year-old Dalcroze: 2/28/17
This was an unusual class in many ways. The girls’ love for dramatic story telling prompted almost an entire class devoted to the development, rehearsal and enactment of one story. The class loosely followed some goals I had already set up, which was to work with 3 different rhythm patterns that are found in the
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7-9 Year-old Dalcroze: 3/6/17
This was another very unusual class. The story from the previous week was very strong in their minds, and they desperately wanted to continue it. That kind of intense student engagement is very hard for me to resist, so I relented, not having the least idea about where it would turn out. To further complicate
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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Dynamics
Read more: DynamicsI wonder if some of the other musical subjects are envious of ‘dynamics’. It’s very name sounds like a superpower. How about the others? ‘Duration’ sounds world weary; ‘Augmentation/diminution’ feels like a medical procedure. ‘Meter’ sounds like something a bureaucrat made up. But ‘dynamics’? It’s very name is brimming with life-force energy. (Note: the image…
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Invisible Subjects
Read more: Invisible SubjectsSometimes, to see the whole, we need to look at the parts. But suppose some of the parts are difficult to see? This is one of the things that makes Dalcroze education so notoriously hard to describe. In one sense, the curriculum for the Dalcroze classes I teach is very straightforward. The list contains things…