The Eurhythmics of Jaques-Dalcroze Part 4

The College itself is a fine example of the value of simplicity and s.p.a.ce in architecture. Both without and within, the block of buildings is impressive, this effect being gained by an extreme simplicity of decoration. The most modern methods of heating and ventilating are provided, and there are large sun and air baths.

Completed in the spring of this year, and with accommodation for five hundred students, the settlement stands on high ground about four miles from Dresden, in an open, bracing, healthy spot, with charming walks in all directions. The views are extensive; to the south lie the Erzgebirge, to the south-east Saxon Switzerland, and, in a dip of the nearer hills, Dresden.

ETHEL INGHAM.

THE VALUE OF EURHYTHMICS TO ART

One of the most marked tendencies of modern aesthetic theory is to break down the barriers that convention has erected between the various arts.

The truth is coming to be realized that the essential factor of poetry, painting, sculpture, architecture and music is really of the same quality, and that one art does not differ from another in anything but the method of its expression and the conditions connected with that method.

This common basis to the arts is more easily admitted than defined, but one important element in it--perhaps the only element that can be given a name--is rhythm. Rhythm of bodily movement, the dance, is the earliest form of artistic expression known. It is accompanied in nearly every case with rude music, the object being to emphasize the beat and rhythmic movement with sound. The quickness with which children respond to simple repet.i.tion of beat, translating the rhythm of the music into movement, is merely recurrence of historical development.

Words with the music soon follow, and from these beginnings--probably war-songs or religious chants--come song-poems and ultimately poetry as we know it to-day. The still more modern development of prose-writing, in the stylistic sense, is merely a step further.

The development on the other side follows a somewhat similar line. The rhythm of the dancing figure is reproduced in rude sculpture and bas-relief, and then in painting.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A Plastic Exercise.]

So we have, as it were, a scale of the arts, with music at its centre and prose-writing and painting at its two extremes. From end to end of the scale runs the unifying desire for rhythm.[1]

[1] For valuable help in these ideas I am indebted to Mr. J. W. Harvey. I should like to quote verbatim one or two remarks of his on the subject, taken from a recent letter: "Human motion gives the convergence of time (inner sense) and s.p.a.ce (outer sense), the spirit and the body. Time, which we are in our inner selves, is more dissociable from us than s.p.a.ce, which only our bodies have; the one (time) can be interpreted emotionally and directly by a time-sense; the other (s.p.a.ce) symbolically, by a s.p.a.ce-sense, which is sight."

To speak of the rhythm of painting may seem fanciful, but I think that is only lack of familiarity. The expression is used here with no intention of metaphor. Great pictures have a very marked and real rhythm, of colour, of line, of feeling. The best prose-writing has equally a distinct rhythm.

There was never an age in the history of art when rhythm played a more important part than it does to-day. The teaching of M. Dalcroze at h.e.l.lerau is a brilliant expression of the modern desire for rhythm in its most fundamental form--that of bodily movement. Its nature and origin have been described elsewhere; it is for me to try and suggest the possibilities of its influence on every other art, and on the whole of life.

Let it be clearly understood from the first that the rhythmic training at h.e.l.lerau has an importance far deeper and more extended than is contained in its immediate artistic beauty, its excellence as a purely musical training, or its value to physical development. This is not a denial of its importance in these three respects. The beauty of the cla.s.ses is amazing; the actor, as well as the designer of stage-effects, will come to thank M. Dalcroze for the greatest contribution to their art that any age can show. He has recreated the human body as a decorative unit. He has shown how men, women and children can group themselves and can be grouped in designs as lovely as any painted design, with the added charm of movement. He has taught individuals their own power of gracious motion and att.i.tude. Musically and physically the results are equally wonderful. But the training is more than a mere musical education; it is also emphatically more than gymnastics.

Perhaps in the stress laid on individuality may be seen most easily the possibilities of the system. Personal effort is looked for in every pupil. Just as the learner of music must have the "opportunity of expressing his own musical impressions with the technical means which are taught him,"[1] so the pupil at h.e.l.lerau must come to improvise from the rhythmic sense innate in him, rhythms of his own.[2]

[1] Cf. supra, p. 28.

[2] A good example of the fertility and variety of the individual effort obtained at h.e.l.lerau was seen at the Auffuhrung given on December 11, 1911. Two pupils undertook to realize a Prelude of Chopin, their choice falling by chance on the same Prelude. But hardly a movement of the two interpretations was the same. The first girl lay on the ground the whole time, her head on her arm, expressing in gentle movements of head, hands and feet, her idea of the music. At one point near the end, with the rising pa.s.sion of the music, she raised herself on to her knees; then sank down again to her full length.

The second performer stood upright until the very end.

At the most intense moment her arms were stretched above her head; at the close of the music she was bowed to the ground, in an att.i.tude expressive of the utmost grief. In such widely different ways did the same piece of music speak to the individualities of these two girls.

To take a joy in the beauty of the body, to train his mind to move graciously and harmoniously both in itself and in relation to those around him, finally, to make his whole life rhythmic--such an ideal is not only possible but almost inevitable to the pupil at h.e.l.lerau. The keenness which possesses the whole College, the delight of every one in their work, their comrades.h.i.+p, their lack of self-consciousness, their clean sense of the beauty of natural form, promises a new and more harmonious race, almost a realization of Rousseau's ideal, and with it an era of truly rhythmic artistic production.

That the soil is ready for the new seed may be shown by a moment's consideration of what I consider to be a parallel development in painting. There is in Munich a group of artists who call themselves Der Blaue Reiter. They are led by a Russian, Wa.s.sily Kandinsky, and a German, Franz Marc, and it is of Kandinsky's art that I propose to speak. Kandinsky is that rare combination, an artist who can express himself in both words and paint. His book--_uber das Geistige in der Kunst_[1]--is an interesting and subtle piece of aesthetic philosophy.

His painting is a realization of the attempt to paint music. He has isolated the emotion caused by line and colour from the external a.s.sociation of idea. All form in the ordinary representative sense is eliminated. But form there is in the deeper sense, the shapes and rhythms of the _innerer Notwendigkeit_, and with it, haunting, harmonious colour. To revert to a former metaphor, painting has been brought into the centre of the scale. As Kandinsky says in his book: "Shades of colour, like shades of sound, are of a much subtler nature, cause much subtler vibrations of the spirit than can ever be given by words." It is to achieve this finer utterance, to establish a surer and more expressive connexion between spirit and spirit, that Kandinsky is striving. His pictures are visions, beautiful abstractions of colour and line which he has lived himself, deep down in his inmost soul. He is intensely individual, as are all true mystics; at the same time the spirit of his work is universal.

[1] _uber das Geistige in der Kunst._ Piper Verlag, Munchen, 3 Marks. See also vol. i. of _der Blaue Reiter_. Piper Verlag, 10 Marks.

In this, then, as in so much else, Kandinsky and Dalcroze are advancing side by side. They are leading the way to the truest art, and ultimately to the truest life of all, which is a synthesis of the collective arts and emotions of all nations, which is, at the same time, based on individuality, because it represents the inner being of each one of its devotees.

MICHAEL T. H. SADLER.