Émile Jaques-Dalcroze

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Émile Jaques-Dalcroze (born July 6, 1865 in Vienna , † July 1, 1950 in Geneva ) was a Swiss composer and music teacher . Jaques-Dalcroze, sometimes incorrectly spelled Jacques-Dalcroze , is considered to be the founder of rhythmic-musical education and was all his life in search of regularities for artistic expression.

Émile Jaques-Dalcroze

Life, work and effect

Dalcroze was born in Vienna in 1865 as the son of Swiss parents. His father was a watch manufacturer. Little Émile often went to the theater and the opera with his parents. With his sister Helene he improvised his first childish scenic representations . Jaques-Dalcroze received piano lessons from the age of six. His piano teacher is said to have been very strict with him and even forbade him to improvise .

The family returned to Geneva when Émile was 10 years old. He completed a music education at the Geneva Conservatory (1877-1883) and studied music and theater for two years at the Paris Conservatory (1884-1886). He was inspired by the additive models of Arabic rhythm when he received an engagement in Algiers as second Kapellmeister for the 1886/87 season . Back in Vienna , Jaques-Dalcroze received composition lessons from Anton Bruckner , which he found too strict and impersonal, which is why he switched to Adolf Prosnitz (piano) and Hermann Graedener (composition). This was followed by a second stay in Paris (1889-1891), during which he met the Swiss Mathis Lussy and received from him significant influences in expression and rhythm theory. Lussy also aroused in him a fundamental interest in reforms .

Then Jaques-Dalcroze returned to Geneva and began in 1892 at the Geneva Conservatory, initially as a theory teacher for harmony, to investigate the connections between music and its dance expression through its rhythm. He further developed the music pedagogical methods of his time, and in the solfège lessons he again came across the rhythm, namely the rhythmic deficiencies of his students. From 1897 he repeatedly published essays on rhythm, music and education that describe the history of his research.

The Dalcroze System of Dancing , book illustration by M. Thévenez, 1912

From Geneva , the method developed together with Nina Gorter since 1902 , the Jaques-Dalcroze (MJD) method, first spread to Germany as rhythmic gymnastics (among others by Alexander Sutherland Neill and Gertrud Grunow ). His goal was originally the development of musicality in humans, which expanded as a result of the universality of rhythm. In 1906 he met the musician and set designer Adolphe Appia (1862–1928). In 1909 he spent a quarter of a year in the reform colony Monte Verità near Ascona, which was later to become a place of activity for his students Mary Wigman and Suzanne Perrottet . In 1911, Jaques-Dalcroze founded and managed together with Wolf Dohrn in Hellerau (near Dresden ) the educational institution for music and rhythm (today: Festspielhaus Hellerau ), which was moved to Laxenburg in 1925 . The teaching demonstrations and productions there attracted the European avant-garde, and his educational and artistic work achieved worldwide recognition. In 1915 he opened the Jaques Dalcroze Institute in Geneva, which still exists today . Rhythmics has been a course of study at German music colleges since around 1925 . In 1926, the International Association of Professors of the Jaques Dalcroze Method was founded, which in 1977 was renamed the Fédération Internationale des Enseignants de Rythmique (FIER) .

In addition to the International Jaques Dalcroze Center in Geneva , there is still a Jaques Dalcroze Institute in Brussels today . There are also around 30 rhythmic training centers around the world, some of which are named after Jaques-Dalcroze.

Émile Jaques-Dalcroze trusted in the interrelationship of the musical, physical and emotional experience that his way of working evoked. Through a wide variety of exercises and improvisation, the rhythm had an impact on the musical-artistic and music-interpretative work through a moving representation. He found that the rhythm had a positive effect in educational processes and in the social learning field. He understood himself, among other things, in the tradition of François Delsarte , who developed systems for increasing human expressiveness for the Paris Opera in the mid-19th century . One of his most important students was Suzanne Perrottet . In Hellerau she worked as a movement pedagogue. The Zurich psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler was one of his admirers .

Compositions

  • La Soubrette (1881), operetta
  • L'Ecolier François Villon (1887)
  • Humoresque (1891) pour orchester
  • La Veillée (1893), oratorio
  • Chansons romandes (1896)
  • Sancho (1897)
  • Jeu du Feuillu (1890)
  • Le Bonhomme Jadis (1906), opera
  • Les Jumeaux de Bergame (1906), opera
  • Fete de la Jeunesse et de la Joie (1923)

The focus of the diverse compositional oeuvre is around 1,200 songs, which are still widespread in French-speaking Switzerland today.

Awards

  • Officer of the French Legion of Honor (1929),
  • Dr. hc from the University of Chicago (1937), Clermont-Ferrand (1948), Lausanne (1945) and Geneva (1948),
  • 1947 Geneva Music Prize

Quotes

“Above all, future upbringing must teach children to see clearly within themselves and to measure their mental and physical abilities against what previous generations have strived for and achieved. It must guide them to experiences that allow them to properly assess their own strengths, to establish the balance between them and to adapt them to the urgent demands of their particular existence as well as of their entire existence. "

- Émile Jaques-Dalcroze (1919)

“It is very difficult to explain in two words a method that will of course require very extensive and very numerous studies and experience. It is a matter of relating the various parts of the children's organism: the brain, the spinal cord, figurative movements, deliberate movements, unwanted movements, automatisms ... and then destroying the bad automatisms, those that are free from their own freedom Resist limbs. For this I have the contribution of music, which is both regulating and stimulating ... "

- Émile Jaques-Dalcroze (1944)

Fonts

  • Premières rondes et enfantines. Editeurs: Sandoz, Jobin et Cie Office international d'édition musicale et agence artistique Paris et Neuchâtel 1904; German language edition: For our little ones. Children's songs and games with explanatory text. German adaptation by Felix Vogt. Sandoz, Jobin & Cie International Music Publishing Company and Artistic Agency Paris and Neuchâtel 1904.
  • Le rythme, la musique et l'éducation. Fischbacher, Paris 1920, Lerolle & Cie, Rouart 1920, Jobin & Cie, Lausanne 1920; Foetisch, Lausanne 1965; Hug Musikverlage, Lausanne 1988.
    • Rhythm, music and education. (Translation by Julius Schwabe) Schwabe, Basel 1921; Georg Kallmeyer, Göttingen / Wolfenbüttel 1977, ISBN 3-7800-6024-8 .
  • Souvenirs, notes et critiques. Victor Attinger, Neuchâtel / Paris 1942.
  • La reforme de l'enseignement musical a l'école . Congrès de l'enseignement musical, Solothurn, Switzerland, 1905. Publisher: Payot & Cie., Lausanne - On the Internet Archive - online.
  • Books by Jaques-Dalcroze in the Internet Archive - online.

literature

  • Karl Storck: E. Jaques-Dalcroze. Its position and task in our time. Greiner and Pfeiffer, Stuttgart 1912.
  • Gernot Giertz: Cult without gods. Émile Jaques-Dalcroze and Adolphe Appia. The attempt to reform the theater on the basis of rhythmic gymnastics. Kitzinger, Munich 1975, ISBN 3-920645-19-7 .
  • Giorgio J. Wolfensberger (Ed.): Suzanne Perrottet. An eventful life. Quadriga Verlag, Weinheim 1995, ISBN 3-88679-246-3 .
  • German Dance Archive Cologne (ed.), Joachim Gobbert: On the Jaques-Dalcroze method. Rhythmic gymnastics as a music educational system. Ways and possibilities of the plastic representation of music by the human body. (= Studies and documents on dance studies. Vol. 2.). Peter Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1998, ISBN 3-631-32527-4 .
  • Willibald Götze:  Jaques-Dalcroze, Emile. In: New German Biography (NDB). Volume 10, Duncker & Humblot, Berlin 1974, ISBN 3-428-00191-5 , pp. 350-352 ( digitized version ).
  • Michael Kugler: The Jaques-Dalcroze method and the Orff school work “Elementary Music Exercise”. Lang, Frankfurt am Main 2000, ISBN 3-631-35252-2 .
  • Thomas Nitschke: The garden city of Hellerau as an educational province . Hellerau-Verlag, Dresden 2003, ISBN 3-910184-43-X .
  • Christine Klaus: Émile Jaques-Dalcroze . In: Andreas Kotte (Ed.): Theater Lexikon der Schweiz - Dictionnaire du théâtre en Suisse. Volume 2, Chronos, Zurich 2005, ISBN 3-0340-0715-9 , p. 918 f. (French).
  • Arnd Krüger : history of movement therapy. In: Preventive Medicine. Loose-leaf collection 07.06. Springer, Heidelberg 1999, pp. 1-22.
  • E. Feudel: Emile Jaques-Dalcroze. In: Riemann Musiklexikon. Mainz 1959.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Giorgio J. Wolfensberger: Suzanne Perrottet - an eventful life. Benteli Verlag, Bern 1989, ISBN 3-7165-0695-8 and Quadriga Verlag, Weinheim 1995, ISBN 3-88679-246-3 .
personal data
SURNAME Jaques-Dalcroze, Émile
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Swiss composer and music teacher
DATE OF BIRTH July 6, 1865
PLACE OF BIRTH Vienna
DATE OF DEATH July 1, 1950
Place of death Geneva