Articles about Dalcroze pedagogy organized by age.
Early Childhood:
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Color My World
How much skill do you need before music is experienced as a creative activity?
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First Instrument
I am always pleased when the old standards come out in my early childhood child/adult groups. I’m not talking Gershwin or Berlin here (though that would be great, too), I mean chestnuts like “The Eensy Weensy Spider” or “The Wheels on the Bus”—even if the adults seem somewhat embarrassed to be singing them. Yes, they
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…