How to Play the Piano - Eurhythmics, Solfege and Improvisation

"Dalcroze Eurhythmics" is an approach to music education based on the premise that rhythm is the primary element in music, and the source for all musical rhythm may be found in the natural rhythms of the human body.

The total method consists of three parts:

1. Eurhythmics
2. Solfege
3. Improvisation

Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, while a professor of Harmony and Solfege at the Conservatory of Music in Geneva, discovered that many of his pupils, although technically advanced on their instruments, were unable to feel and express music.

• The couldn't deal with even the simplest problems of rhythm.
• Their sense of pitch, tonality, and intonation was defective.
• They possessed a mechanical rather than a musical grasp of the art of music.
• They couldn't hear the harmonies they were writing in their theory assignments.
• They were not able to invent simple melodies of chord sequences.
• Their lack of sensitivity created problems in their individual performances.

Dalcroze spent his life inventing ways to help his students develop their abilities to feel, hear, invent; sense and imagine, connect, remember, read, and write; perform and interpret music.

Dakcroze's thoughts went beyond the subject of music teaching.

1. What is the source of music?  Human emotions are translated into musical motion. 
2. Where do we sense emotions? In various parts of the body.
3. How does the body express these internal feelings to the external world?  In posture, gestures, and movements of various kinds: automatic, some are spontaneous and others are the results of thought or will.
4. By what instrument does a human being translate inner emotions into music?  By human emotion.
5. What is the first instrument that must be trained in music?  The human body!

I personally subscribe to this philosophy!  

To this end,the daily practice of scales and arpeggios is indispensable.

The Reasons for Training in Rhythm

The aspects of music that make the most definite appeal to the senses are RHYTHM and MOVEMENT.

Rhythm and dynamic energy are entirely dependent on movement and I find their best model in muscular systems.  ALL degrees of tempo can be experienced, understood, and expressed with the body.

KINESTHESIA:  The Missing Link

Dalcroze postulated that whenever the body moves, the sensation of movement is converted into feelings that are sent through the nervous system to the brain which, in turn, converts that sensory information into knowledge.

The BRAIN judges the information and ISSUES ORDERS to the body again through the nervous system.

The brain converts feelings into sensory information about direction, weight, force, accent quality, speed, duration, points of arrival and departure, straight and curved flow paths, placements of limbs, angles or joints, and changes in the center of gravity.

These orders are given to protect YOU from injury and to find the most effective ways to move through the mental phenomena of attention, concentration, memory, will power, and imagination.

Today this process is called the "kinesthetic" sense.  We all have it... which is why you don't walk into walls?

To hone your kinesthetic sense, YOU MUST practice scales and arpeggios SLOWLY!

My students, young and old, have achieved success in playing the piano through my carefully crafted piano teaching methods that are connected in a constant spiral of learning:

1. hearing to moving;
2. moving to feeling;
3. feeling to sensing;
4. sensing to analyzing;
5. analyzing to reading;
6. reading to writing;
7. writing to improvising; and
8. improvising to performance.

I know it works, because it worked for me!