The Importance of Being Rhythmic

This book contains the best, the clearest exposition of the remarkable theories of Jaques Dalcroze which I have yet seen. If his teachings were accepted and taught to the children of the entire world, it would effect a revolution, and a finer, a nobler race would be the result. Dalcroze himself is an excellent musician who perceived the intimate relations existing between music and bodily movement. Others before him, notably the great Froebel, had already taken cognizance of this, but Dalcroze, from the musician’s standpoint, has developed the idea into a great and complete science. It is a revelation to see his pupils express music (and themselves) in rhythmic pantomime. The effect on executors and auditors is compelling, and makes us feel with renewed conviction the Greek axiom, that music and bodily movement are one and inseparable. I should like to see an enthusiastic teacher of the Dalcroze method placed in every public school of our country. It would let daylight into many a dark torture chamber of the ordinary teaching of music, which consists mainly in the practicing of dreary scales and the exclusion of anything like feeling.