stage-effects,
will come to thank M. Dalcroze for the greatest contribution to their
art that any age can show. He has recreated the human body as a
decorative unit. He has shown how men, women and children can group
themselves and can be grouped in designs as lovely as any painted
design, with the added charm of movement. He has taught individuals
their own power of gracious motion and attitude. Musically and
physically the results are equally wonderful. But the training is more
than a mere musical education; it is also emphatically more than
gymnastics.

Perhaps in the stress laid on individuality may be seen most easily the
possibilities of the system. Personal effort is looked for in every
pupil. Just as the learner of music must have the "opportunity of
expressing his own musical impressions with the technical means which
are taught him,"[1] so the pupil at Hellerau must come to improvise from
the rhythmic sense innate in him, rhythms of his own.[2]

[1] Cf. supra, p. 28.

[2] A good example of the fertility and variety of the
individual effort obtained at Hellerau was seen at the
Auffuehrung given on December 11, 1911. Two pupils
undertook to realize a Prelude of Chopin, their choice
falling by chance on the same Prelude. But hardly a
movement of the two interpretations was the same. The
first girl lay on the ground the whole time, her head
on her arm, expressing in gentle movements of head,
hands and feet, her idea of the music. At one point
near the end, with the rising passion of the music, she
raised herself on to her knees; then sank down again to
her full length.

The second performer stood upright until the very end.
At the most intense moment her arms were stretched
above her head; at the close of the music she was bowed
to the ground, in an attitude expressive of the utmost
grief. In such widely different ways did the same piece
of music speak to the individualities of these two
girls.

To take a joy in the beauty of the body, to train his mind to move
graciously and harmoniously both in itself and in relation to those
around him, finally, to make his whole life rhythmic--such an ideal is
not only possible but almost inevitable to the pupil at Hellerau. The
keenness which possesses the whole College, the delight of every one in
their work, their comradeship, their lack of self-consciousness, their
clean sense of the