l teaching of movement. This is based in earliest childhood
on the automatic exercise of marching, for marching is the natural model
of time measure.

By means of various accentuations with the foot, I teach the different
time measures. Pauses (of varying lengths) in the marching teach the
children to distinguish durations of sound; movements to time with the
arms and the head preserve order in the succession of the time measures
and analyse the bars and pauses.

All this, no doubt, seems very simple, and so I thought when beginning
my experiments. Unfortunately, the latter have shown me that it is not
so simple as it seems, but on the contrary very complicated. And this
because most children have no instinct for time, for time values, for
accentuation, for physical balance; because the motor faculties are not
the same in all individuals, and because a number of obstacles impede
the exact and rapid physical realization of mental conceptions. One
child is always behind the beat when marching, another always ahead;
another takes unequal steps, another on the contrary lacks balance. All
these faults, if not corrected in the first years, will reappear later
in the musical technique of the individual.

Unsteady time when singing or playing, confusion in playing, inability
to follow when accompanying, accentuating too roughly or with lack of
precision, all these faults have their origin in the child's muscular
and nervous control, in lack of co-ordination between the mind which
conceives, the brain which orders, the nerve which transmits and the
muscle which executes. And still more, the power of phrasing and shading
music with feeling depends equally upon the training of the
nerve-centres, upon the co-ordination of the muscular system, upon rapid
communication between brain and limbs--in a word, upon the health of the
whole organism; and it is by trying to discover the individual cause of
each musical defect, and to find a means of correcting it, that I have
gradually built up my method of eurhythmics.

This method is entirely based upon experiments many times repeated, and
not one of the exercises has been adopted until it has been applied
under different forms and under different conditions and its usefulness
definitely proved. Many people have a completely false idea of my
system, and consider it is a simple variant on the methods of physical
training at present in fashion, whose inventors have undoubtedly
rendered gr