Dalcroze Method

While teaching music at the Geneva Conservatory, he observed that his students lacked essential musical skills. They could not actually hear the music and harmonies they were writing. When they performed, their playing showed little sense of rhythmic life.

Dalcroze began to explore these natural, instinctive gestures. He invited students to walk and swing their arms, or to conduct while they sang or listened to him improvise at the piano. He called this study of music through movement “eurhythmics,” from the Greek roots “eu” and “rythmos” meaning “good flow.”

Dalcroze continued to experiment with eurhythmics, giving demonstrations of his "Rhythmic Gymnastics" throughout Switzerland and Western Europe. In 1911, he founded a school in Hellerau, Germany, where he refined his pedagogical methods and mounted innovative theatrical productions informed by these newly developed aesthetic principles.