One of the most exciting accomplishments of 2024 was made possible through a collaboration with my dear friend and Dalcroze wizard, Anthony Molinaro. We made a thing! The project is called Make It Music — Dalcroze Strategies for Every Classroom.
Anthony spent all of last school year doing graduate work at Carnegie Mellon, and we thought...while we were both there, seeing each other every day, we should look for some way to meet and share ideas. I have been BLOWN AWAY by his work with the kids for years. He has such a thumb on the philosophy behind the Dalcroze Eurhythmics routines. It is always a joy to talk to him about his classes and to compare notes.....and that is what we did! For most of the last year, we met every week to compare ideas about what excites us in our teaching practice. We each shared stories and ideas and talked about all parts of Dalcroze pedagogy, practice, history, and how we use all of that to craft lessons for our students.
We discussed quite a few ideas, but we kept coming back to two prevailing points—ideas critical to our Dalcroze practice.
The first is what we are calling "open-ended lesson planning." Under this discussion is the balance between advance lesson planning and in-the-moment ideation in co-creation with our students. The example of in-the-moment ideation was always on great display with my foremost Dalcroze mentor, Dr. Marta Sanchez. I once watched Marta teach 4 back to back classes, just riffing on the dotted-eighth-sixteenth rhythm. (Honestly! She showed up to class that day with that rhythm on a post-it note, stuck it to the piano, and just improvised her whole, AMAZING, day of teaching!)
There is certainly a huge need for the night-before planning that we all do to arrive at our classes prepared and organized. I have written out the lesson plans for every class I have ever taught. (I still have them all in a big file cabinet – 33 years' worth of single-page lesson plans 😱) But I never believe I have done the best Dalcroze work if my creativity stops there. The real magic is found when I can 'get into the zone' with my students. My goal is to spin a lesson that starts with some idea(s) from my lesson plan, and then see how those initial ideas open up possibilities and potentials in my students. When it is working the way it should, I end the day with more ideas than I started. My students and I have come to new understandings, new exercises, new orderings, new turns of phrase....new insight that was just not possible when planning by myself the night before. The Make it Music book takes some pages to try to describe the open-ended-lesson phenomenon and then builds a set of tools to help teachers who might be new to this mindset.
The second set of ideas we kept visiting was the nature of artistry in the Eurhythmics class. Anthony and I both come from mainstage performance careers, each of us spending years as live performers before really doubling-down on classroom teaching as our #1 devotion. When I was singing in or directing main stage operas, it was easy to see myself as an artist. The open stage is defined by the creative, the interpretative, intimate work in ensemble with others. You have to take risks and own them on the live stage. You have to show-up, be fully present, and give yourself over to the practice. The "artist" title was easy to carry.
As a young teacher, it was not obvious to me what classroom work had in common with main stage artistry. Teaching can be a slog. Students are not always interested in finding the close ensemble or taking musical risks together. Bell schedules, academic calendars, grades (!), and the bureaucracy of many schools are all pressures that can distract us from the first reasons we are there and the profound work that we do.
But as I started to focus more on Dalcroze ideals and included more of the exercises; as I strove to honor the traditions and paid more attention to the "body is the first instrument" mantra, the teaching artist persona became more and more apparent. Our Dalcroze routines not only push the student to be present, embodied, creative and self-aware, but they ask the same of the teacher! Crafting my interactions with the classes, co-creating exercises, discovering new variations on the themes, taking risks, performing in ensemble, and moving together. It is not only 'like' mainstage performance; the opportunities for artistry are largely identical. The Make It Music book challenges every reader to take on the title of Teaching Artist and then continue to work in that framing.
The book comes with 4 decks of cards — a tool for creating new exercises and challenging our routines. You can read all about it at make-it-music.com. Please check it out and let me know what you think!!!
Thanks to Anthony for the ideas/writing collaboration. And thanks to Melissa Neely for making everything look SO AMAZING!! She is the real superstar in my life. 💕
