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Hi this is Jeremy Dittus from the Dalcroze School of the Rockies and you're
listening to the Musicality Podcast. Ever wondered why some people seem to have a
gift for music have you ever wished that you could play by ear sing in tune
improvise and jams you're in the right place time to turn those wishes into
reality welcome to the Musicality Podcast with
your host Christopher Sutton hi this is Christopher founder of Musical U and
welcome to the Musicality Podcast have you ever heard of Dalcroze it's an
approach to music learning that often discussed alongside Kodály or Orff but
until this interview I must confess that it's one I didn't know very much about I
spoke with Dr. Jeremy Dittus the founder and director of the Dalcroze School of
the Rockies in Denver which is one of the most prominent Dalcroze schools in
the US and I asked him about his own experiences learning this approach and
why and how he teaches it now Jeremy has been a lecturer in piano theory and
solfege at the Baldwin Wallace Conservatory in Cleveland he's taught
undergraduate solfege piano and Composition courses at the University of
Colorado in Boulder as well as eurhythmics and solfège at L'Institut Jaques-Dalcroze
in Geneva Switzerland and Colorado State University in Fort
Collins Colorado Wow at the Dalcroze School of the Rockies he now leads a
team providing Dalcroze Eurythmics and Dalcroze rhythmic self-etch courses to
ages 4 through 14 years old as well as popular classes for adults in this
conversation we talked about how reading between the lines of sheet music Schenkerian
analysis and Dalcroze all helped transform Jeremy into the musician and
educator he is we talk about what exactly Dalcroze is
and how each of its five components can benefit a musician we talk about why a
and tower Dalcroze users vote the fixed and the movable joe's systems of salt
fish and how dal crews can enrich a musician who's learning in the
traditional way and five walking past a dal cruise classroom typically means
seeing a room full of adults smiling moving and having fun
I found this conversation really illuminating and it inspired me to learn
more about Dalcroze training myself I hope that you'll find it just as
enlightening my name is Christopher Sutton and this is the musicality
podcast from musical you welcome to the show Jeremy thank you for joining us
today thank you so much for having me I'd love to learn more about your
musical background I know a fair bit about what you're up to now at the
Delacroix School of the Rockies but I don't know that much about your early
music education could you tell us how you got started well it's kind of funny
because I actually studied with my mom when I was a kid I studied piano and and
I studied with her for approximately eight months or so and and then that
sort of ended my mom had a full studio and she was busy and to be honest
studying with your parents can be really tricky and my mom was a great teacher
but I maybe wasn't the best student for her and so what ended up happening is
that I would oftentimes just learn pieces here and there as I was growing
up and and it was just different because I didn't have weekly lessons like most
people would the other thing that's interesting about my mom is that she's
deaf almost a hundred percent and so so here you have a deaf piano teacher that
has this fantastic studio of students in very rural Ohio and and yet there just
wasn't a lot of opportunity or time for me to be able to have lessons with her
and you know all the things that go with a parent son relationship but get
complicated so so yeah but my mom was the person that introduced me to music
and she
I really kind of instilled a love for music I think with me my dad played the
guitar and I was raised on a steady diet of Patsy Cline and Kris Kristofferson so
that was the the background there lots of Waylon Jennings let me tell you there
was good times and and then after I stopped studying with mom
it was probably until I was a junior I think in high school before I started
thinking about doing music in any way shape or form I had always wanted to go
into medicine and that's what I thought I was going to do for Schumer and and I
went to a little school in Indiana a little Quaker school called Earlham
College and as a part of the campus I had the opportunity to take a lesson and
meet a woman named Eleanor Vail who completely changed my life in many ways
because she said that I should have a teacher but I didn't have a teacher and
she would be my teacher so I drove as a you know 16 17 year-old kid from Plain
City Ohio across state lines to go study with Eleanor Vail in Indiana and it was
this wonderful experience to be like free on society and you know studying
music and and she really inspired me to consider music in a in a more I don't
know forward way I guess so that's kind of my background and then I went to
undergraduate school and it wasn't until my sophomore year that I actually
declared myself to be a full performance major in piano and kind of the rest is
history I see and was your music learning up until that point kind of
traditional classical sheet music reading or was it more freeform creative
what did it involve um it was definitely much more classical in design and and I
think what's kind of interesting about my my background is that
I was actually never a very good sight reader and my reading skills were always
really just generally quite poor and when I went to undergraduate school I
really struggled as a result of this it was something that was really tricky
because my mom had this piano studio I heard a lot of music in the house all
the time and often times that was the music that I would play so it was almost
quasi Suzuki in that way and the sense that I had this really strong aural
stimulus in the house and of course these are these are piano students so
it's not like I'm hearing the world's best predictions of these pieces but
nevertheless that's what that's how I learned a lot of pieces for myself was
because I had heard them so I did a lot of playing by ear even though I would
use sheet music to kind of figure things out I didn't necessarily use it to like
study the form study the harmony I did not use it in those ways I was very very
poor at reading rhythm which is funny because now that's what I do
and yeah so it's interesting I see and so you went into major as your undergrad
in music and obviously now your big focus is on the Dalcroze method
particularly how where did that come from when did you discover that how did
it come about total luck it just so happened to be that at my undergraduate
school which was the baldwin-wallace University in Cleveland when I went to
undergrad there was somebody there very adult and she was in charge of piano
pedagogy and she was in charge of selfish there and she had worked into
the entire solfege program your Rhythmics component and so every day or
sorry every week we would have classes with her for an hour we would have an
hour of you Rhythmics and we have two other separate classes for selfish and
that is really how I learned rhythm because everything
was so strongly aural the visual component was very different for me and
and so I never really understood rhythm well at all until I had this course and
partially because I was a gymnast in high school I had a strong kinesthetic I
don't know sense I guess I I I was drawn to kinesthetic things I've always loved
to work with my hands that kind of thing so this just totally made sense to me
that you would study rhythm through movements and it completely changed how
I how I heard music how I felt music how I communicated music it was really a
godsend for me because I don't know if I would be doing what I'm doing now had I
not had that experience so paint a picture first then you had been learning
piano in quite a traditional way and then suddenly as part of your undergrad
you have this one hour each day of your it mix and solfege what were you doing
in that hour how did it all come to life for you in that way well that's kind of
complicated I suppose I mean and to be honest it was a long time ago okay well
let me ask you a different question that if you were going to give a young
undergrad an hour of Dalcroze training each day what might that look like and
how how might it give them that kinesthetic sense of rhythm in the way
you just mentioned I so for the classes that I teach when I am teaching
undergraduates the most important thing is that I give them multiple ways of
knowing the same concept so oftentimes it starts with me at the piano and them
moving just doing something totally pedestrian like just walking and
adjusting the speed of their gait to the tempo that I produce from the piano
while I'm improvising and from there that's from that point of departure we
go into any number of subjects it could be meter it could be beat it
could be division it could be multiple like in other words by combining
multiple beats together you create a lower beat value and acoustic phrasing
shape syncopation you name it but it starts from there and my thing as a
teacher especially if I'm working with college students and I think that Mary
would agree with me that it's not as much about the difficulty as it is about
the sensation the sensation is where it's at how we sense something how we
feel it in the body that's what gives us the impulse to want to create it and to
communicate that and that element is inherent in every one of us I don't care
if you are a six month baby or if you're 90 year old grandmother that that
impulse is there and when you give permission for that to take place I
think it's something that's really marvelous I see I think that definitely
gives a sense of how those sessions would have been quite different from
sitting at a piano and play group music it sounds like there's a lot of movement
involved there's a lot of physicality involved that's often you know just not
a part of music education except you know where do you put your fingers in
the instrument absolutely I think that the the essence behind what we do
whether or not I'm dealing with college students or if I'm dealing with
four-year-olds is is that I want to give them an experience and I want to give
them many many experiences of the same technical concept like let's say beat
but I want to give them those experiences in very very different ways
so I stimulate their kinesthetic sense but I stimulate their aural sense that I
stimulate their their their their visual step that the sense as well so we're
combining all of these things together so no matter what the learning style
that students are experiencing things in many many different ways and once
they've had that experience then I can say this is what it looks like this is
what we call it and this is the definition which is still to this day
pretty pretty novel I guess I mean most most of us were taught in a
very different way yeah almost the exact opposite you know let's study the
symbols and then slowly learn to play them and then we might think about how
to make them musical okay so you had this very different experience then was
it love at first sight were you Dalcroze devotee from day one or how did the next
few years ago for you well I mean I love Mary's classes I mean I always looked
forward to them and and I'm still close friends with her to this day she has
actually taught at my Delco summer Academy and we bring her out to Denver
for workshops all the time she's just fantastic but you know I did a little
bit of tutoring and volunteering at the University when I was a student and I
enjoyed that but for me it was tricky because I was also a chemistry student I
had always this strong penchant for medicine and that's what I thought I
wanted to do and it wasn't until like the witching hour the very very end of
my undergraduate that I was like oh I think I'm gonna try and see what happens
I'm gonna apply to music schools and and I got in to to CCM the Cincinnati
Conservatory of Music and and I decided to do that just to see how it would feel
because I thought my process at the time was well I can always go back to
medicine but music is something if you don't keep it going then it kind of goes
away it's nice to have medicine as your full backup should I like that well yeah
it's kind of funny isn't it it's crazy so anyway I went to I went to CCM and I
had several different piano teachers while I was there for a couple of
different reasons one of the teachers that I was assigned at the time was
Michael chair talk and he was awesome I loved him and but he was only there for
a short time because then he went on sabbatical and that I had his teacher
which was Freight who is Frank Weinstock who is also amazing but I ended up
having these kind of this sort of choppy piano background and and that was really
challenging for me because I had this teacher and undergrad for a piano who
really was all about bringing the page to life and reading between the lines on
the score and all of that kind of thing and that's hard to develop that type of
a relationship with the teacher if that's not what where you are and you
don't have that that depth of a relationship when you're changing a lot
of time and so I really fell in love with the theory program there there was
a guy named Frank Sam urato who was there who was amazing and he he was
ashen karien and I totally fell about with Jim Carrey an analysis like just
took to it like glue and and it has stuck to me for
to this day but I always had this real disconnect and I think that this is very
real for many many many people when they leave either undergrad or graduate
school that the the theory community tended to stay off in one wing through
the music conservatory and the performance community was in another and
they did not necessarily interact very well or very much I should say and and
that was something that was really hard for me because I I had trained over so
it was intense about developing and available or music how do you bring that
out and how they can affect your performance and and my performance
teachers who were a little bit more focused on the technical aspects of
making it happen and who knows that I'm sure it was a lot to do with me and my
pianist ability at the time and all of that but but I felt like I couldn't make
those connections and it was something that I really really wanted for myself
and so when I was thinking after I finished my my master's degree where I'd
done all of this theory training and all this performance training I wanted to
find something that would put those two things in dialogue and I remembered back
in my undergrad this experience of having classes of Merida Bria and how it
totally changed me and and so I called her up and said hey what do you think
what do you think about this what should I do and and she
recommended that I studied the Longy school and so I went to the laundry
School of Music in Cambridge Massachusetts during the summers while I
was doing my doctor and piano performance and and I think that that
experience of up having this really intense corporal understanding of music
in the summer is helped to feed my doctoral studies and it helped it helped
me become the teacher that I am today because I've combined what I know and
shame karien theory I've combined what I know
in movement from being a gymnast I've combined all of this pretty extensive
performance background to put something together that is really meaningful to me
and I hope I think for my students too wonderful I didn't want to interrupt you
there but there were a couple of things I wonder if you could just explain a bit
more about one is that you said your teacher was helping you to read between
the lines as you played piano what do you mean by that
I think gosh it's so hard dr. cherry was kind of like a magician hey you know I
mean I remember I was playing the list concerto and you know that piece is
wicked hard it just has so much in it that's very complicated and especially
for for me as an undergrad I did not have the experience to to really rely on
so he was trying to help feed me Oh different ways of studying the score and
and I remember he would point things out like listen for this line here can you
hit can you see it on the score can you can you see that and then I want to I
want you to bring that out in your pinky let's say in your left hand or it's in
an inner voice and I want you to listen to how that affects the shaping and it
was sort of like magic like all of a sudden because I listen to this one the
inner voice it completely changed how I heard the music and because it changed
how I heard it the the physical technique sort of fell into place for me
to be able to play it and there are countless other stories that were that
were like that where he would he would let's say draw
tension to peddling detail peddling that is you know it very well maybe on the
page but he was so particular about peddling there's a guy named Joseph bana
whit's who wrote a book on peddling and it's
like an inch and a half thick it's just this tome and and he and my professor
would have gotten along like you know because dr. Cherry's perspective on this
was if I can hear that you're pedaling you're not doing it right and and that's
not something that you could find in the score necessarily it's something it
overtly I mean that you could find it written te D with a dot you know or
asterisk but but what he was saying is what are you trying to say through the
music what are you finding in the score how can your foot help to bring that out
and make that clearer to an audience and whatever your intentions are what are
you trying to say through the music I mean those are two very small examples
but they were very powerful for me as a young student yeah that makes a lot of
sense and I think it explains how you were kind of rescued from the trap I
think a lot of instrument learners fall into of starting to play a bit like a
robot you know if I play the right notes at the right times I'm doing my job
but clearly your teacher there was helping you draw out the music from the
sheet music he was helping you find the interpretation that you actually wanted
to express absolutely and I think that
that because of that it really ain't coupled with the Dell Crowes that I had
as an undergrad and moving on to other periods of my life has really allowed me
to have a sense of suppleness when I approach a piece of music I am NOT
prisoner to the page and and in the way I might have been in the past
and I think that that can be very liberating don't get me wrong I think
that that there is so much structure that's in the music itself that we have
to delve into but that's where the idea of a physical experience of those
concepts no matter what they are can make it easier for you I think as a
performer very cool so speaking of structure the other thing
I wanted to just pick up on before we move on was shankari and allow us to
even say shrink Aryan analysis which is not something you find people you know
falling in love with very often can you just explain for the audience in a
nutshell what it is and why it was interesting to you sure so Heinrich
Shanker was as it was a theorist and a philosopher and he he essentially came
up with a way of analyzing music that highlighted all the structural
components both melodic and harmonic and sometimes rhythmic you know so these
these the pitch and harmony together but dividing up sorry pitch and rhythm
together but dividing up pitch in the two components melody and harmony and
putting them in a kind of contrapuntal sketch that had many many layers so at
at the top you know you have pretty much the way the the music sounds and maybe a
Roman numeral analysis of what are the harmonies and where they going
but then in each subsequent layer that you that you go through you find that
some notes are maybe less important or some notes are more important than
others some notes have more structural significance than others and they proved
to be goals like let's say the end of an antecedent consequent relationship in
terms of a question/answer phrase you got that and so that's a that's a it's a
big moment or the end of a significant cadence or the end of us of a structural
section these are all points that we want to bring out that sometimes get
lost when we do a typical Roman numeral analysis again because of the visual
aspect of it it's all just under the page and you don't really see a
hierarchy but the Schenk Aryan analysis allows us to give a hierarchy to what we
listen to and in that way the analysis is very
personal and and it allows us to really talk about what do we find meaning or
what do we final in the score eventually you you bring down almost every single
piece of tonal music to either a three to one progression like three blind mice
three two one or five four three two one in the soprano and basically a 1:1 or
one-to-one these kinds of reductions in the harmony for me that's less important
when I go down to that level I'm not saying that it is important it's just
less important for me but that's not how I I find this to be useful how I find it
to be useful for me is that when I'm looking at an analysis like this when
I'm doing it when I am improvising I find myself creating these structures
in my own improvisation and my own playing and when I'm performing I'm
moving towards those structures so like I hope that when people hear my music
that they can hear that I am being very directive in my playing there's a sense
of tension and release that comes from arrival points at these structural I
don't know goals or milestones in the piece so is that helpful it is I think
that's the most interesting and compelling description of it I've ever
heard you managed to make it sound practical and useful in a way that's
often missing very cool so it sounds like that was interestingly another way
that you discovered to transform what can be a very kind of opaque sheet of
music into something that has structure has meaning and has a way for you to
bring it to life it's it's been very powerful for me it's been very powerful
so you did your PhD where did you go from there
so after I I finished it's it's funny I did a couple of rounds of auditions for
four academic jobs because you know if you're gonna do a doctorate that's like
the next thing right you go get a job in a in a
university and and I had taken a sabbatical replacement job when I was in
finishing up my DMA and these different things and and to be perfectly honest I
wasn't always happy I just I don't it's something about it just didn't seem
right and I'm sure it's just who I was at the time and maybe even Who I am now
but it just didn't feel right and I can remember sitting in my my office at
school and and I had just finished my Dell Krause training at etymology and I
studied with some of the best teachers in the world
Lisa Parker and Anne Farber and Ruth ala person and Ginny lacz and just really
class act musicians and human beings and and I just sat down and said I don't
think I'm gonna do this I think I'm going to just try my hand at teaching
Dalcroze for a little while and just see what happens which you don't know my
personality but that is not the way anything in my life had ever gone I was
out of high school right through undergrad right into graduate school
right into my doctoral programs I went to school year round I mean it was just
I've been a professional student for a long time and to say that that's not
what I was gonna do was a really big deal for me I know for some people it's
like no big deal but for me it was and and it was so bizarre because it was
like the next day I got a phone call from somebody that said hey I'm offering
this event and I would really love to have a Delco specialist which would be
willing to come and Tamara Goldstein who is a fantastic pianist here in Denver
was running a piano celebration and she invited me to come and I taught a class
and Bill Wesley who wrote an amazing book
called the perfect wrong note if you don't know that book you should
definitely check it out it's amazing he actually was a del Crowe student himself
when he was a child and he has gone on to win international competitions and as
a pianist and he teaches in Texas but he showed up to my class so like this guy
that I've read about who is this you know
just monument of a person shows up to my first class and I'll never forget it
because he came up to me afterwards and he shook my hand he said you were born
to do this Wow and that was really touching to me
do you know what I mean it was like one of those moments it's just people don't
usually say things like that certainly not to me and that was a big
shame because I felt like that moment in the office this particular gig or two
gigs and then all of a sudden this whole door just opened and and now this is
where I I am I taught for two years here in
Denver I had probably about 75 students or so in my programs and lots of people
were asking me about teacher training and I had a certificate and I had a Dell
Crows license those are kind of like our bachelor's and our master's degrees in
our field but in order to be able to teach you're trained you have to get
something called the Diploma Sakura which just means it's the highest
diploma that doesn't mean that you're superior just be fiction today but it's
at the highest level and and so I auditioned and was promptly rejected
from the Institute shock Dalcroze it Switzerland because that's where you
have to go to get this credential and that I said phooey I'm going there and I
wouldn't study there for a year Andrey auditioned and then finished my diploma
in six months and came back and started my school so that's where I'd been Wow
and we've got a bit of a sense of what's involved in del CROs and how it differs
from traditional music education but can you unpack it a little more what are the
key components to it what is it that defines Dalcroze as a methodology sure
so del CROs can be very difficult to talk about because it's so comprehensive
and and I think it deserves mentioning that del CROs himself you know as a man
who was around in Switzerland of the first part of the 20th century he he was
a composer he was a philosopher he was a musician himself and he was a
gaagh so his perspective about all of this at the beginning was decidedly
about music training that's what he wanted to that's what he was doing
that's where this all stem from so for him it was about solfege and it was
about improvisation and it was about this thing called lecithin eek so we
have translated that first in Britain and now in the United States as your
rhythmic so your you meaning good and with most meaning rhythmic or rhythm so
good rhythm is what it comes from or stems from and those classes those
arithmetics classes were essentially the goal of them was to embody all elements
of music from all the whole gamut of pitch and rhythm form and structure all
of that would come together in a year of mixed class that's not to say the
solfege classes and the improvisation classes weren't physical either and you
kind of see this in a slightly different way depending on where you where you
study at the del crow school the Rockies it's very important to me that we
physicalize everything so all solfege is is to be done with movements so my thing
that I say to my students is if you're not moving while you sing while you're
singing something's wrong so you gotta fix it and but that's unique to my
school that's part of my style it's something that I do but but I think
that's important to say all of this happened back in first part of a 20th
century in addition there has now evolved some applied branches of what we
do in del crow study which is called plastique anime plastique anime is kind
of our performance outlet for what we do it's a type of visual analysis using the
body as the vehicle and and we we tend to do it using a written score so a
composed score other places in the around the world will do it slightly
different sometimes they will do them improvised for instance either with
improvised piano music or the movement is improvised so
there's there's different applications it's not quite as rigid but in the u.s.
we tend to think of it in that way it can be with soloists it can be with an
entire group you can really have the gamut but it's wonderful because I
actually think of it very similarly it's how I think of Shing caring in
theory because it's all about demonstrating what I find valuable in
the piece but instead of being limited to just Roman numerals I've got the
whole expressive capacity of the body and and that I think is really really
wonderful and communicative and meaningful in a way that I think you
know Roman numeral Roman numeral analysis could be great but it can be a
little sterile you know if it's not done well and so this is a great alternative
and then the fifth branch is its pedagogy methodology what are we doing
and how do we do it so all of those five branches your is mcsullen improv
plastique anime and pedagogy comprised the method Jacques del CROs and that is
primarily as a vehicle for teaching music
however as del CROs aged and his disciples went off into the world there
have been many many applications to many different fields kids with special needs
students with learning disabilities different ways of looking at just let's
say classroom teaching how can we use movement in the body to teach math how
can we use music to teach any number of subjects like that all has route in Del
CROs you might remember something called School House Rock when you were a kid or
maybe you I think you're too young for that but back in the 80s this was a big
thing and and like you know my husband for instance I mean he can recite to
this day all of the presidents and all of the the the little jingles that go
with the Courtney junctions that all of this sort of thing
because of school house rock so it really has it has had an impact and
people don't realize that that all comes that all comes from what Dell CROs did
it also has been a huge force in work with senior citizens mostly in Europe
but we're starting to see in the United States how we've got the seniors that
are falling and they're losing balance and all of that but when they go to Dell
Krause classes there's scientific evidence that's showing that that's not
necessarily reversing but it's keeping it from getting worse which is really
huge we could see applications to dancers we
see lots of applications more in Europe and in the United States but for stage
actors and people that are doing theater musical theater for certain so there's
there are so many different ways that you can go with this method now which i
think is really really powerful yeah fascinating that is clearly a lot packed
in there and I think we'll definitely have to include some videos in the show
notes of a plastic anime and and other aspects of Dalcroze so people can see in
action I wonder could you paint a picture for us of not before and after
but with and without delacro's if we take say an 18 year old pianist who's
been studying piano his identical twin has done the same but with Dalcroze
training alongside what would those two different musicians look like how would
they be different well okay so if if I'm going to be completely honest and I will
be I need to say this first and foremost that telcos isn't for everyone you know
what I mean I think that we would be remiss to think
that there is such a thing as a method that works for everyone you could
imagine that if we're moving and we're using the body that for some people this
is going to make them feel uncomfortable for any number of different reasons and
and so I think that I just have to say that this is a highly personal and
that's the blessing and the curse of this method is that it can be so
individual but what I can tell you is this is that I
teach a course in Adele crows at Hope College in Holland Michigan and every
semester I get students that say I so wish I would have had this when I was a
freshman because I'm usually teaching juniors and seniors at this point
sometimes some sophomores but almost all of them will say that at some point and
especially when we start talking about meter and we start talking about things
like Polly rhythms and Polly metric relationships like three against four or
things like that or syncopation things that when you experience it in your body
it's such a different different feeling than when it's just in your hands or
just at your instrument and and so I think that what I would say is that a
student that has had this experience is going to have more information to draw
upon when looking at a piece of music they might look at a short short long
pattern and they might feel it in a different way because they remembered
that when you when you step short short long that the the steps are shorter on
the on the shorts and they they take up more space on the lungs and so there's
this energy transfer of short short long short short long and as you go into the
long that energy has to transfer and shift well let's take the piano for an
example if you play that on the piano once you press the key down it's over
you press the key down there's nothing more you can do to the sound really it's
done and so how you approach it is a hundred percent key to whether or not
you make a musical sound now we can go into all sorts of detail about the angle
of the thumb and the angle of the hand and the velocity of the finger and which
knuckle is going to produce this tension and you know the the descent into the
key etc but at the end of the day it's about feeling what does it feel
what does that rhythm feel like what does it sound like in your inner ear and
how can I create that I feel like that college freshman is going to understand
that component in a way that might be indescribable to the other in other
words he's gonna have more ways of knowing and I think that more ways of
knowing is very powerful especially in today's day and age I love that and I
think I'm sure it resonates with a lot of our listeners because I think we all
have that feeling that music should be kind of natural and intuitive and
something you feel but if it doesn't happen for you automatically from birth
then it it can be a bit intimidating or frustrating or disappointing and I love
how you've described it there that this is something you can learn and you can
develop the sense and if you study it in the right way you can gain that kind of
physical instinct for how to express yourself in music I totally agree for me
talent is a four-letter word I think it's uh it really is it's a it's it's
tricky and that's not to say that there aren't people that have a disposition
towards a natural inclination towards X Y or Z but I think that that we use that
word in such a damaging way often you know terrible self-talk and and the fact
of the matter is there are lots of really really quote talented be people
out there that are not working that are not able-bodied musicians in the world
because they don't work hard and I think that hard work and dedication and all of
those kinds of things give us way more repay us more dividends than any you
know four-letter Talent word ever will but what I think is very cool about this
del CROs I think it does it in a joyful way which i think is really really
marvelous you know whether or not it's the type of games that we play the ways
that we are responding to music that are very varied
friends and using the aural stimulus as a means to create change in the
classroom it's just fun you will inevitably pass a a good Dell CROs class
and see you know 12 to 15 adults smiling and skipping around the room at that to
be is just marvelous you know and then if they can take that
and make it a musical application that makes their life richer oh that's that's
where it's at amazing I want to ask you something that
may be too big would you complicate it a question to
tackle in a short podcast interview so you can tell me if it is but I'm sure a
lot of our listeners have heard of Dell crows and the kinds of activities we've
been talking about things like rhythm activities sulfa exercises and so on and
they've fully also heard of Kodai and off and these may all be a bit of a
jumble to them so I was wondering if you can explain what sets those three apart
or what sets Dalcroze apart from Kodai and off in terms of what they have in
common or what their strengths and weaknesses are sure I'll do my best I
think that before I say anything I need to preface this with the fact that all
of these learning modalities are are really dependent on the teacher and and
the region of the world in which they are taught so what I'm about to say I
think will hold true in many cases but maybe not all so I don't want to try to
to speak for a community that is really really diverse and rich in a way that
would be limiting but when I introduce tell crows to people that don't know
anything about it I explained it as Dell crows education is an experiential way
of knowing music through the body and so in that short statement we are saying
that the body is going to be the focus and that music music is going to be our
our driving force and that the goal is going to be to learn
and to know music in a different way but through a physical means if you go and
study in a Kodai classroom they may well do movements but the goal is different
and in the sense that it their their job may or may not be really to physicalize
the sound not to embody it that's not necessarily their mo I think that in a
Kodai classroom the focus is on the human voice and the voice is the primary
instrument on the contrary I would say Delta and Elk Rose the body is the
musical instrument the body is the primary instrument that's what we're
dealing with and encode I the voice is in or it's tricky because ourf
is kind of a combination of some elements of code I and some elements of
del CROs del CROs was essentially the founding father of all music education
so it really is the root of these two other methods in many ways it's they
stemmed from from him they didn't study with him directly or anything like that
but but it's but del crosnes reached in Europe was pretty pronounced so del CROs
had this corporal understanding this bodily understanding there was also a
lot of focus on improvisation and selfish in ear training but it was kind
of different Kodai is all about the voice and that
element and or kind of combine those two together but focused it using
instruments so let's say using marimbas or xylophones or glockenspiels and that
sort of thing so and and even that just to say that is a little bit limiting but
I think that I think that many or people would agree with me in that sense though
they also use recorders and all kinds of other instruments besides just pitched
percussion so but that's their focus and they are very very heavy
on improvisation and what they do but it's different than our improvisation
which i think is interesting but what unites us is that especially in the
United States is that we're all really focused on teaching music and we want to
we want our students to be musical and we want all children's have access to
this and we want all adults to have access to this this type of joyful way
of understanding music the other thing that separates us though that I will
just talk about two things number one is that delacro's remains to this day the
only modern method of music education that was designed for professional
students for adults so it did not start with children it started with students
at the Conservatoire de genève and so and this is in the the late 1800s Early
1900s was when Del CROs was there and you know list died in 1886 list was on
faculty at the Conservatoire de genève at that you know right before that time
and this del crow studied with for a and Piaget all of these huge figures to
creative method but it was not designed for children and it wasn't until much
later that he thought well I need to start earlier because this isn't working
the way I want it to so so there's that and then I think the other thing that
makes us a little bit different from the other two is that we really champion
fixed though solfege that's something that we really uphold especially because
we are in this the french-speaking part of Switzerland
that's just gonna be what we're gonna use if you go to Italy Spain France they
all are gonna use fixed Oh however Dalcroze
actually was very very focused on the relative pitch relationships in solfege
training so he used numbers and he had students singing on numbers and if you
look at his books you can discover this the thing that makes it tricky is that
in his books he writes them in Roman nu which makes people think it's talking
about harmony but it's not it's talking about pitches and and so that's
something I think is really powerful so now at the Dell Chris school of the
Rockies because I live totally an orphan code I country out here in Colorado I
have all my students sing on numbers and I also have them sing on letter names so
they do both pitch and function they do a fixed system and they do a moveable
system not to complicate any of this but if you study at the Kodai Institute and
catch commit hungry if you study there what's really fascinating to me is that
yes they are movable dough solfege yes they are a la bass minor but all of
their students sing on letter names and that's
something that people don't know and I think that's oftentimes they don't know
and I think that's really fascinating and I think that the idea that you have
to have both if you have just you know function that does not necessarily have
the same weight as when you are talking about the pitches that you're singing
and that's what mixto solfege is all about if you call it dough or if you
call it C I don't care doesn't matter to me whatever makes the most sense to you
as long as you're naming it it's what matters thank you that was that was a
phenomenal explanation both of the three camps and I appreciate you made clear
there that you know it's not set in stone each of these methods have
different interpretations and different practitioners but I think the way you
explained it there will really help people to understand the strengths of
each or the focus of each and I love how you just explained to fixed a movable
dough or you know the different approaches to selfish because it it
trips so many people up and as you say you know there is a value in a fixed
system and for some people that's letter names will call them C D and E and in
parts of Europe that's fixed though it's doremi and there's a value to the
relative system and whether you call that doremi or one two and three they
give you a different perspective on the same thing and I I don't know I I get
tired sometimes of the religious arguments you sometimes stumble into
particularly online where people are you know fighting for fixed overs as movable
though and the reality is they're they're completely different systems you
know it's like a bearing apples and oranges that
trying to convince someone one is better than the other well and they both serve
different purposes I think and I too and exhausted by these debates that happen I
always bring it up when I'm teaching in my summer programs or when I'm teaching
in my year-round program to first year and even sometimes second years solfege
students in my my adult program because I want them to be well versed to
understand why is there a debate and why is it in my opinion kind of a a waste of
energy because the fact of the matter is you need both you just do we I think any
musician that's weighted that any musician that really wants to delve into
music and all of its expressive and structural capacities needs to have an
understanding of where they are in this scale if they're looking at tonal music
but if they don't know what that pitch is that's it batter but can't play it
you know so I don't know it's funny so it's something you mentioned to me when
we were talking before we start recording was daily solfege devotionals
I'd love for you to explain a bit about that and and what this looks like in
practice if your students are thinking both in movable and fixed do so it
doesn't matter if you're six years old at my school or if you're 76 at my
school you always will sing on numbers and you'll sing on letter names so long
as you're dealing with music that's not modulating so for me it is about
planting little ear worms for students and daily solfege devotionals for me is
like let's say little songs or something like that that I might write that I
might compose for my students that that teaches them something that is unique or
that that's powerful and what ends up happening is that that ear worm that
little tune sort of digs in and then when they are waiting at the bus stop or
if they are waiting doctor's office or you know they they
just have a little bit of downtime there in their shower this Tunes gonna come in
to their to their ear and that way they can be practicing their solfege on
numbers on letters however they they need to in that moment but they don't
actually have to say I'm practicing it I'm not actually sitting down doing Dell
crows or solfege practice but they are practicing when they don't think that
they are they're making it a part of their daily life which to me is that's
the whole point of a devotional is to make a point of tranquility and I don't
know calm in your life to bring you some sort of thing that's richer it to be
this is a savings bag you know and it doesn't matter if it's a chord Samba to
teach all of the different inversions or the Neapolitan boat saag that teaches
all of the scale degrees for the being Neapolitan or like a tango that teaches
the different Augmented six chords all of that kind of stuff it plants in their
ear and then they can use it whenever they want I love that it reminds me of a
fun discussion we've had inside musically you recently where some of our
members who are working on sulfur were challenging each other to come up with
the sulfur for Christmas carols because when that song gets stuck in your head
you may as well use it for a bit of music practice this is exactly this is
exactly my point to a lot of my it's my students who are teachers I will say to
them whenever you're working with your students sing sing the melody sing the
bass line sing it on numbers sing it on letters and encourage your kids to do it
because the more you do it the more they're gonna do it and so then solfege
becomes a part of your daily life in that way so yes would you mind could you
give us an example of one of these devotionals one of your students might
be humming or singing to themselves in their head sure
so yeah I'll just I'll just sing it is that okay if I just sing it but sure is
that good so um I might you sing with me one of my tricks here we go for flat ooh
flats no we're done me up all that so this is
talking about the Neapolitan six chord and and how it it works in the in the
course of musical function you know it's it happens as we lead towards the
cadence and what are the notes involved you got to get two flat two and you also
have to include flat six and it starts with four even though I arpeggiated down
and up but that's the goal is to get to four because it's in first inversion and
and I think that it's kind of fun because as soon as that gets in the
students ear they're set so you know what I mean I love that that's fantastic
because they're gonna both be better able to spot that when they hear in real
music and they are reminding themselves constantly if the theory behind it well
right and I think that in in the course of the tune when you get there when you
get to this flat - it's sort of like the Sun comes out you know it's this really
blossoming moment and in order to be able to sing it you really have to have
internalize that you have to really get it into your into your body you have to
you have to sense that and oftentimes when the kneeble halogen comes out in
classical repertoire that's how it happens it happens in this way that's
sort of magical and lucky I think of the opening of Oh opus Beethoven sonata the
apassionata it was fifty sub no no yeah
fifty seven think because in in that piece you know he starts in this F minor
chord and then all of a sudden you know the Neapolitan comes out and it's so
shocking and yet so wonderful it's lovely
so something he said there that is really fascinating to me in which I must
admit I was not really aware of before is that Dalcroze really wasn't designed
for children to begin with I think because I'm a bit more familiar
with code I I think of Dalcroze in the same camp as B
you know children first and then the adults can Tagalog I'd love to hear what
does del cruise look like if you have say a middle-aged person come to you
who's been learning an instrument for a bunch of years and is curious about Delk
roads what kinds of things do you have them doing and how is that rewarding for
them as a musician well the way that it's structured at my school is that we
have classes for students who are interested in adult enrichment so there
these are students they could be adult amateurs but they could be professionals
but they just want to find new ways of learning music or knowing music through
their body they want to explore that movement component and and so oftentimes
the classes that I would teach for professionals or professionals would be
the same that it would look like for a non-professional because even if a
professional knows what they're doing they they know they don't know it with
their body you know they may know it in terms of the from the neck up but they
don't know what from the neck down and and so a lot of those activities that I
described to you before that would be something that we might do but I'm also
a huge fan of using material in class so like for instance I might do a changing
meter activity where we where we find ways to to demonstrate let's say meters
of four and three and compare them to one another using a ball so you might do
a like a bounce catch catch bounce catch catch or bounce catch toss catch bounce
catch toss etc if we do things that are like that then it gives them this sense
of what does the meter feel like what is what is the shape of the measure which
is something that I never really had talked about until I was in an Adele
CROs environment because measure shape is really huge it's what gives us this
sense of forward motion in in a phrase in many ways and and so I think that
students can take that but we might work on particular patterns let's say like a
short long or a long short short or syncopated
patterns like short long short short long short or offbeat patterns like Dada
Dada Dada and and put those in our body give ourselves ways of physical izing
that and the goal is so that way at the end of the class we arrive at a piece of
music and it could be like for piano it could be vocal it could be for the
violin it could be anything but then we move through that piece of music and we
explore the details of that piece of music and by doing that we give these
students a different perspective they kind of really go deeply into a subject
oftentimes when I'm teaching these kinds of classes I I focus to one particular
subject in a class like I don't do a hodgepodge of different things and since
the classes are usually about 90 minutes I mean 90 minutes on syncopation you can
get a lot done you know you really can you can really go into a very deep place
and and then the goal would be that they after they've seen it in this piece of
music that we've explored in class that when they're looking at another piece of
music but they're playing that they're like oh oh I did that I did that I put
that in my body that's what that is that's that amp BRAC AMPA Brack rhythm
or whatever it is if you don't have you so I think that kind of is very useful
for them fantastic and I love the way I love the word you use to describe that
enrichment because I think that that characterizes it so nicely it's not
something just for beginners it's not something just for more advanced did
something that adds a whole new dimension I think to everything you've
been studying in music very cool is so I'm sure a lot of our listeners at this
point are super curious and intrigued and wanting to know more about Dalcroze
can you tell us the best way to get involved maybe for the adult musician
and for the adult who has a child who's learning music what are the best avenues
for them to get involved in Dalcroze well it all depends on where you
but the first stop would be at double-double wwws USA ERG so that's our
national website for the del crow Society of America and you can find all
sorts of information there and resources and you can find out about programs that
might be offered in your area you can always visit my web site which is the
del crow school of the Rockies dot-com so that's a place where you could go and
on that website you you would find like youth programs and adult programs and
links and there's some a whole link that's all about us and there you can
find videos and all kinds of examples of things and literature that kind of goes
into detail like what is a what does a rhythmic solfege class look like for
six-year-olds and what does it look like once they're 12 you know just so you
could see with that what that material would be and once you go to those two
websites if you go there that would give you a lot of information and more places
that you could contact to find out about del crows in your area terrific well
we'll definitely have links to those as well as the videos we mentioned earlier
in the show notes for this episode thank you so much Jeremy it's been such a
pleasure to hear more about your own journey and the del cross school of the
Rockies and delgros in general thank you for joining us today
thank you it's been a pleasure unlock your full musicality with musical you
membership Jeremy's enthusiasm Fidel Cruz is really infectious isn't it I
loved learning more about the different components of Dalcroze how it helps
people today and also how Jeremy himself discovered it and found it filled in a
piece he hadn't even known was missing in his music learning
Jeremy grew up playing classical piano and approaching music in quite a
classical sheet music focused way but through teachers who taught him to read
between the lines and the theory of Shankar Ian's analysis
he found that there were ways to bring the music out of the sheet music and
focus on breaking out his own musical expression not just playing the notes in
a technically correct way he also discovered that Dalcroze training gave
him a whole new dimension of musical experience and it was this that he found
himself drawn back to eventually committing to studying it at the highest
levels in Geneva Switzerland and founding the Dalcroze school of the
Rockies providing training to children adults and aspiring Dalcroze educators
he explained for us the five components of Dalcroze Eurythmics meaning good
rhythm solfege improvisation plastique anime and pedagogy I loved his
explanation of how a musician with and without Dalcroze training would be
different that the musician who has learned with Dalcroze would have a a
more innate physical sense of what's going on in music that instinctive feel
for music which many of us grow up thinking is a gift that few possess is
actually something learning and Dalcroze is all about internalizing that physical
sense of rhythm and pitch in melody and harmony I asked Jeremy a question about
how Dalcroze Kodai and Orff compare which he was brave and diplomatic in
tackling given how fervent followers of each of those three can be in level efz
although each one can't be put into a fixed box necessarily I liked the way he
gave of understanding the comparison and the relationships between them Dalcroze
focuses on physically experiencing music with the body being the primary
instrument for musical understanding and expression while kody focuses more on
using the voice and/or somewhat blends the two and also had seen a lot of
application on instruments as Jeremy putted Dalcroze was essentially the
forefather of all music education and so a lot of the different approaches can be
traced back to the work he did one thing which distinguishes Dalcroze is that in
teaching solfege they use both fixed and moveable dough as we've talked about on
this podcast for comparing the two systems can be a
bit misguided as it's really only the naming that they have in common
Jeremy gave a great explanation of this he points out that every musician needs
a fixed system whether that's note names like CD and D or fixed dough like doremi
and we also need a relative or functional system whether that's scale
degree numbers like 1 2 3 or movable dough solfege like doremi and it doesn't
really matter all that much what naming conventions you use at the
Dalcroze school of the Rockies for example they actually sing with note
names and with numbers I loved Jeremy's idea of solfege devotionals we're
learning little ditties can help you to internalize the pictures as well as the
theory corresponding to music theory ideas like common chord progressions or
melody movement and although I think you need to see it in action
to really get a sense of it I thought his examples of how Dalcroze students
can experience rhythmic patterns through walking or bouncing a ball really
painted a vivid picture of how differently and how powerfully this
approach varies from the standard way of learning music which is focused purely
on reading notation and developing instrument technique to see you in
action I'd encourage you to check out the Dalcroze school of the rockies
website at Dalcroze school of the Rockies comm Dalcroze spelled d al croz
e and we'll have links to that as well as the other websites books and videos
mentioned in this episode in the show notes at musicality podcast calm thanks
for listening to this episode stay tuned for our next one where we'll be picking
up on something that Jeremy mentioned meter and we'll be talking about meter
in music and also time signatures thank you for listening to the musicality
podcast this episode has ended but your musical
journey continues head over to musicality podcast.com where you will
find the links and resources mentioned in this episode as well as bonus content
exclusive
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