ould form a part of every
well-organized musical education, and this study will be useful not only
to musicians, but to music itself. It is quite certain that, if since
Beethoven's time harmony has developed, if each generation has created
fresh groupings of sounds, it is not the same regarding rhythmic forms,
which remain much as they were.

I shall be told that the means of expression are of no importance so
long as the artist is able to show his meaning, that a sincere emotion
can be clearly expressed even with old-fashioned rhythms, and that to
try and create new rhythms is mere technical work, and to enforce such
upon the composers of to-morrow is simply depriving them of their
character. This is all true, and I myself have a horror of seeking new
means of expression within the limits of hard and fast rules, for
expression ought to be a spontaneous manifestation. But I assert that
experiments in rhythm, and the complete study of movements simple and
combined, ought to create a fresh mentality, that artists thus trained
will find inevitably and spontaneously new rhythmic forms to express
their feelings, and that in consequence their characters will be able
to develop more completely and with greater strength. It is a fact that
very young children taught by my method invent quite naturally physical
rhythms such as would have occurred to very few professional musicians,
and that my most advanced pupils find monotonous many contemporary works
the rhythmic poverty of which shocks neither public nor critics.

I will terminate this short sketch of my system by pointing out the
intimate relations which exist between movements in time and movements
in space, between rhythms in sound and rhythm in the body, between Music
and Plastic Expression.

Gestures and attitudes of the body complete, animate and enliven any
rhythmic music written simply and naturally without special regard to
tone, and, just as in painting there exist side by side a school of the
nude and a school of landscape, so in music there may be developed, side
by side, plastic music and music pure and simple. In the school of
landscape painting emotion is created entirely by combinations of moving
light and by the rhythms thus caused. In the school of the nude, which
pictures the many shades of expression of the human body, the artist
tries to show the human soul as expressed by physical forms, enlivened
by the emotions of the moment, and at the same time the