Courses taught at Bennington College:
AY 2023-2024
AY 2021-2022
AY 2020-2021
AY 2019-2020
AY 2023-2024
- Dalcroze Eurhythmics: Experiencing Body, Expressive Body
- Dalcroze Eurhythmics is a music class where we practice sensing the body through sound. What do you know that your sentient, feeling body did not first experience? How does music help you express yourself? Can music help you get to know someone else?
The feeling body is the single constant throughout all of our experiences, but can be easily forgotten amidst the notes and rhythms of music learning. Swiss pianist and composer Emile Jaques-Dalcroze (1865-1950) wanted to change that. Hoping to make music learning less abstract, he created Eurhythmics, not just to instill a connection between sound and gesture, but to return his music students to the body as the seat of musical experience.
This Fall, we’ll ask how the philosophy of Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961)–that we come to know the world subjectively through the living body-subject–can help us give language to music’s vital presence in our lives. In Dalcroze, as Dr. Marja-Leena Juntunen explains, “the main goals are to encourage musical expression and creativity, to lead students to trust their own ideas and creations, and to help them discover their body as an expressive musical instrument.” Join us!
- Dalcroze Eurhythmics is a music class where we practice sensing the body through sound. What do you know that your sentient, feeling body did not first experience? How does music help you express yourself? Can music help you get to know someone else?
- Dalcroze Eurhythmics: Groove, Body, Flow State
- When we lose our bodies in space, how do we retrace our steps? How does the body move in response to a constantly changing environment? Can we use music to communicate or even initiate a true, embodied experience? To all three, Swiss pianist and composer Emile Jaques-Dalcroze (1865-1950) thought it was impossible not to. As a professor at the Geneva Conservatory, Dalcroze devised a course called Eurhythmics to explore music, movement, creative and social abilities, and the sensation of perception–what we know today as our eighth sense, interoception. This spring we’ll be exploring interoception and its role in deepening our music making. What can groove teach us about entraining to the rhythm of others, about that human pull towards synchronicity and togetherness, and about the self-integration that can lead to flow? As musicians, we enmesh ourselves in sound, but even more in the deeply felt movements within. As Dalcroze said, “To live life fully, both the mind and the body must be free.”
- MFN 2120: Dalcroze Eurhythmics: la gymnastique rythmique
- This Fall, we’ll be focusing on embodied harmony. What propels a melody forward, pulling the listener along, yearning for resolution? How do we reach for new harmonic possibilities in our songwriting, in our improvisation, in our movement? Why do some chords seem to lead to other chords? The Swiss musician Emile Jaques-Dalcroze (1865-1950) developed a whole pedagogy of music and movement to explore these questions.
Together, we’ll focus on plastique animée, a movement practice that Dalcroze created for analyzing sound, incorporating the principles of breathing, countermovement, energy flow, balance, symmetry, and sensuality. We’ll attempt to feel with our arms and legs what a melody ‘wants’ to do next, and explore how those embodied responses come into being. We’ll also investigate how artists like Stanislavsky, Laban, and Kandinsky followed Dalcroze in expressing the intrinsic, physical, and visceral bond between performing artists and their work.
- This Fall, we’ll be focusing on embodied harmony. What propels a melody forward, pulling the listener along, yearning for resolution? How do we reach for new harmonic possibilities in our songwriting, in our improvisation, in our movement? Why do some chords seem to lead to other chords? The Swiss musician Emile Jaques-Dalcroze (1865-1950) developed a whole pedagogy of music and movement to explore these questions.
- MIN 2249: Piano Lab I
- Have you been thinking about learning to play the piano? Perhaps you have a little experience from childhood and want to get back into it? Are you a singer, songwriter, producer, or composer who wants to accompany themselves, learn to read sheet music and chord symbols, and/or understand the basics of music theory? Maybe you are completely new to playing an instrument, and want to give it a try? If you answered yes, then Piano Lab I might be right for you. We gather once a week in groups of six, with each student working individually on full-size keyboards with headphones. We take turns playing for each other on the Steinway baby grand, with a small concert at the end of the term. Since it’s a lab class, there is a focus on individual goals and progress, with some group activities and lots of group support.
AY 2021-2022
- MFN 2147: Dalcroze Eurhythmics: A Pedagogy for Noticing
- What do you know that your sentient, feeling body did not first experience? The Swiss musician Emile Jaques-Dalcroze (1865-1950) developed a whole pedagogy of music and movement to explore this question. Self-awareness, self-expression, and musical knowing are all seated in the body, the fundamental constant of all experience. But how do we honor that truth in our learning? We notice and name discrete events, but what of the flow that connects them?
In Eurhythmics (greek for ‘good flow’), we’ll explore through music what embodiment, proprioception, and attention to nuance can teach us about design. Playfully noticing the aesthetics of experience, we’ll consider how we shape our world to be inclusive, interactive, and compassionate. As Stephen Neely, a modern Dalcroze pedagogue writes, “The human experience is analog. It is the actual, visceral, flesh and bone, breathing, beating body that is the only translator of experience we possess.”
- What do you know that your sentient, feeling body did not first experience? The Swiss musician Emile Jaques-Dalcroze (1865-1950) developed a whole pedagogy of music and movement to explore this question. Self-awareness, self-expression, and musical knowing are all seated in the body, the fundamental constant of all experience. But how do we honor that truth in our learning? We notice and name discrete events, but what of the flow that connects them?
- MFN 2148: Dalcroze Eurhythmics and the City of Rhythm
- Founded in 1909, the garden city of Hellerau had an odd design aesthetic: everything would be based on principles of rhythm. Instead of placing a church in the center, the city planners invited the Swiss musician and choreographer Emile Jaques-Dalcroze and the visionary stage designer Adolphe Appia to design a modern theatre and college where they would teach Dalcroze’s Methode Gymnastique Rythmique (Eurhythmics). Imagine a town designed around a massive modernist community arts center!
The City of Rhythm thrived until the outbreak of World War I, and the College’s artist colony attracted innovators like Mary Wigman, Serge Wolkonsky, Serge Diaghilev, Vaslav Nijinsky, and Marie Rambert. In this class, we’ll take off our shoes and move! We’ll explore Dalcroze’s method of embodied rhythmic practice and what happens when revolutionary creatives live and work in community, questioning traditions, supporting each other, and designing for a new shared paradigm.
- Founded in 1909, the garden city of Hellerau had an odd design aesthetic: everything would be based on principles of rhythm. Instead of placing a church in the center, the city planners invited the Swiss musician and choreographer Emile Jaques-Dalcroze and the visionary stage designer Adolphe Appia to design a modern theatre and college where they would teach Dalcroze’s Methode Gymnastique Rythmique (Eurhythmics). Imagine a town designed around a massive modernist community arts center!
AY 2020-2021
- MFN 2118: Dalcroze Eurhythmics: The Body Indispensable
- What if everything you want to understand about music is already within you, innate, instinctive, indelible? When Emile Jaques-Dalcroze (1865-1950) first taught harmony to students at the Geneva Conservatory in the 1890s, he found a disconnect between their aural perception and physical coordination, and devised a coursework to re-unite the two. He called it Eurhythmics, inviting students to move according to the nuances of music to uncover this embodied truth: all rhythm is the body moving through space. Part expression, part exploration, and part meditation, “Eurhythmics,” he wrote, “is not an art form–I want to shout that from the rooftops–but a path towards art.”
- MFN 2174: Dalcroze Eurhythmics: Time, Space, Energy
- We performers, makers, and listeners think of sound as music’s medium, but we don’t just hear music: we feel it. We will play with embodiment and as the origin of dynamic, felt experience and with proprioception as the bridge connecting our innate musical understanding to the abstract language of musical sound. Students’ weekly homework–listening, conducting, and following scores–will support sessions of movement and singing to understand notes and rhythms as the building blocks of expression. Meredith Monk, herself a Dalcroze Eurhythmics student, said it this way: “All musical truth resides in the body.”
- MIN 2221: Brass
AY 2019-2020
- MFN 2114: Dalcroze Eurhythmics: Groove, Gesture, and Embodied Knowing
- Emile Jaques-Dalcroze (1865-1950) saw all music as a metaphor for the body experiencing itself. We don’t just hear music: we feel it, and the Swiss-born composer and teacher invented a whole coursework to musically explore our sixth sense, proprioception. In Eurhythmics, (greek for ‘good flow’) we’ll play with embodiment as the origin of dynamic, felt experience, designing games of movement and music to challenge the depth, breadth, and quality of our awareness. Students’ weekly homework–reading and labelling scores and leadsheets to understand the grammar of music: notes, rhythms, and harmonies–will help build fundamentals of musicianship, alongside exercises in rhythm, singing, and reading.
- MIN 2221: Brass
- Through weekly one on one lessons, deepen the connection between your abilities on your instrument (any level) with your listening diet. Develop spotify playlists that spotlight your aspirations as a musician, and use the fundamentals of brass playing to get closer to those aspirations. Each week will include some amount of transcription, composition, and/or improvisation. Students will prepare work to show at Music Workshop (Tues. 6:30 – 8:00 pm). At least one performance at Music Workshop is expected.
- Through weekly one on one lessons, deepen the connection between your abilities on your instrument (any level) with your listening diet. Develop spotify playlists that spotlight your aspirations as a musician, and use the fundamentals of brass playing to get closer to those aspirations. Each week will include some amount of transcription, composition, and/or improvisation. Students will prepare work to show at Music Workshop (Tues. 6:30 – 8:00 pm). At least one performance at Music Workshop is expected.