Guest Speaker
Deanna Clement
PhD candidate in Music Theory
Location: Humanities 2441
Musical Learning in Esquisses Rythmiques, No. 41
In his Exercices de plastique animée
(1916), Émile Jaques-Dalcroze includes a movement-music exercise set to Esquisses
Rythmiques No. 41 whose movements follow the music’s melodic contour.
However, to read these movements with the music in such a cursory manner leads
us to miss other processes operating within the music—and which Dalcroze’s plastique
choreography draws our attention. By tracking degrees of muscular tension
employed in the choreography alongside the music, we find that Dalcroze’s
choice to send us into a deep lunge at the outset of No. 41 is reflective of a
modal ambiguity created by the music’s opening G-flat, despite the B-flat major
key signature. In the mist of this ambiguity, we stretch “an imaginary elastic”
across our bodies and arrive at this motion’s apex at the same time as
G-natural, the musical highpoint. As Dalcroze repeats the G-natural apex three
times, our questions about No. 41’s proper mode only grow stronger. He
clarifies No. 41’s major mode in the penultimate measure of No. 41, as
G-natural passes through G-flat to F and we finally resolve both the musical
and physical tension. One may read Dalcroze’s treatment of the G-flat as
working along the lines of how psychologist Jean Piaget (1896-1980) describes a
child’s learning process in The Origins of Intelligence in Children
(1952). When confronted with a stimulus that cannot be negotiated using existing
knowledge, the child adapts his or her existing schemas to the new situation
and regains his or her state of equilibrium. In a similar way, the opening
G-flat in the music of No. 41 presents a new stimulus with which the rest of
the music grapples. In a sense, then, the music itself learns to
accommodate the new musical stimulus.
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