characteristics
suitable to the individual and his race, such as they appear through
momentary physical modifications.

In the same way, plastic music will picture human feelings expressed by
gesture and will model its sound forms on those of rhythms derived
directly from expressive movements of the human body.

To compose the music which the Greeks appear to have realized, and for
which Goethe and Schiller hoped, musicians must have acquired experience
of physical movements; this, however, is certainly not the case to-day,
for music has become beyond all others an intellectual art. While
awaiting this transformation, present generations can apply education by
and for rhythm to the interpretation of plastic stage music such as
Richard Wagner has imagined. At the present day this music is not
interpreted at all, for dramatic singers, stage managers and conductors
do not understand the relation existing between gesture and music, and
the absolute ignorance regarding plastic expression which characterizes
the lyric actors of our day is a real profanation of scenic musical art.
Not only are singers allowed to walk and gesticulate on the stage
without paying any attention to the time, but also no shade of
expression, dynamic or motor, of the orchestra--crescendo, decrescendo,
accelerando, rallentando--finds in their gestures adequate realization.
By this I mean the kind of wholly instinctive transformation of sound
movements into bodily movements such as my method teaches.

Authors, poets, musicians and painters cannot demand from the
interpreters of their works knowledge of the relations between movements
in time and in space, for this knowledge can only be developed by
special studies. No doubt a few poets and painters have an inborn
knowledge of the rhythms of space; for instance, Hugo von Hofmannsthal,
the stage mounter of "Electra" at the Vienna Opera, who constructed a
huge staircase, on which, however, the actors, having little
acquaintance with the most elementary notions of balance, moved with
deplorable heaviness; or again, the aesthetician Adolphe Appia, whose
remarkable work _Music and Stage Mounting_ ought to be the guide of all
stage managers. But the majority of composers write their plastic music
without knowing whether it is capable of being practically realized,
without personal experience of the laws of weight, force and bodily
movement.

My hope is, that sincere artists desirous of perfection and see