Eurhythmics for Instrumentalists - Prof. Elisabeth Pelz

Sensing, feeling, performing – Eurhythmics / Music and Movement with Instrumentalists

The approaches to eurhythmics within body-oriented teaching enable a holistic approach that gives students a wide variety of ways to become more in tune with their body, develop their creativity and respond to disruptive factors such as poor posture, etc., with and without instruments, with and without media support, and with and without music in the process of "sensing – feeling – performing".

I try to facilitate a transition from functional movement to a more complex mode of consciousness during artistic activity. In addition, this work is about developing one's own musicality based on the idea of making the body perceptible and thus being able to draw on a wide variety of perspectives for sound production, developing an individual practice canon and differentiated modes of consciousness.

These approaches can spark enthusiasm for movement, awaken curiosity and provide a physical knowledge that enables precision, intensity, presence and clear contours for instrumental playing.

E. Jaques-Dalcroze (1907) writes in „Der Rhythmus als Erziehungsmittel für das Leben und die Kunst" ("Rhythm as a means of education for life and art"):

"Rhythm is physical in nature; it is the movement of matter in time and space in a logical and proportional arrangement. The task of every muscle in life is to produce movements of a certain strength and length and in a certain space. By logically ordering the relationships between these three elements of movement, each muscle creates a rhythmic impression in the brain, which converts the sum of these impressions into will, i.e. into regular habits, constant spontaneous readiness for action and complete freedom of imagination. This is how the forces of movement of the mind are formed."

“The last quote in particular seems like a condensed manifesto of "eurhythmics" developed by which thus obviously originated from a pianistic nucleus, or at least from an instrumental pedagogical and didactic concern." (Schroedter, 2018) Schroedter goes on to write in her article, which traces the highly topical research into the connections between proprioception and Dalcroze's theories on muscle sense:

"...that sense which is responsible for the perception of one's own movements, but also for self-perception through movement – in order to then establish, from a phenomenological perspective, the concept of 'kinesthetic hearing' as the direct intertwining of auditory perception with (visible or imaginary) movements."

In other words, the translation into movement leaves traces in the neural network and differentiates the musical expression in relation to space, time and force in each step of the transformation.