Rhythm in Space: Émile Jaques-Dalcroze and Le Corbusier at Hellerau

JOSEPH CLARKE on the German music teacher and gymnast who inspired Le Corbusier

First published Winter 2013

The same dancelike turns and sweeping spatial gestures witnessed by DOCOMOMO-UK members at a September 29 event dedicated to Émile Jaques- Dalcroze first stirred the architectural imagination a little over a century ago. Much more than a music teacher, Dalcroze (1865-1950) founded a rhythmic gymnastic movement that counted adherents across many nations and left an enduring mark on European culture. Among his enthusiastic admirers was a young Le Corbusier, who made several trips to Dalcroze's school outside Dresden while his brother Albert was a student.

Dalcroze had developed a way to teach music by associating rhythmic patterns with specific body movements, a technique he called plastique rythmique or 'Eurhythmics.' Like Le Corbusier himself, Dalcroze hailed from a watch-making region of Switzerland, but it was in opposition to the metronomic regularity of much contemporary music education that he sought to convey a more fluid, instinctive feel for rhythm. Inspiration for this undertaking came both from the theatrical doctrines of Richard Wagner, whose aesthetic theory accorded a prominent role to the performer's body, and from late 19th century psychophysical research on reflexes and motor coordination. Critics of the Eurhythmic project claimed to be scandalized by the practice at Dalcroze's school of performing gymnastics in underwear-like garments, but their distaste was actually fed by deep unease with the ethos of his work: liberation from
the trappings of fin-de-siècle culture, a sense of communal harmony disconnected from religion, and a dream of perfect unity between physical, mental, and aesthetic education.

This dream was expressed, in the culture of Eurhythmics, by a fascination with ancient Greece and a light, abstract visual style defined by Dalcroze's collaborators Adolphe Appia and Alexander von Salzmann. Appia, a disaffected Wagnerian theatrical designer, had been mesmerized at a Eurhythmics demonstration by the possibility of translating
musical figures into specific spatial forms. He sent Dalcroze a series of what he called 'Rhythmic Spaces' – compositions of simple, dramatically-lit orthogonal forms meant to provide a graceful setting for the body – and was soon invited to come and work with the music teacher. Salzmann, a Russian lighting designer and painter once associated with Munich's Blaue Reiter group, possessed the technical know-how to implement his and Appia's vision of a uniformly glowing space in the central hall of the building. Light 'must be just as free-floating and dynamic as sound,' he explained in the Institute's annual journal in 1912. 'We have transformed the entire hall – the four walls and the ceiling – into a single great luminous body. We have installed rows of light bulbs in niches and The architectural setting of Dalcroze's school registered a similar experimental sensibility. The idyllic town of Hellerau, located several kilometers north of Dresden, had been built around a socially progressive factory established by furniture designer Karl Schmidt. The settlement was conceived as the first German application of Ebenezer Howard's Garden City principles and realized in 1909 through the enthusiastic planning of politician and cultural impresario Wolf Dohrn, then serving as the first General Secretary of the Deutscher Werkbund. That year, after witnessing a Eurhythmic demonstration in Dresden, Dohrn was inspired to suggest that a new institute led by Dalcroze become Hellerau's spiritual heart. A prismatic, classical structure was proposed by Heinrich Tessenow, known for his proto-rationalist but humanistic architecture. Unadorned save for the esotericist touch of a yin-yang symbol in its pediment, the design – which took the Wagnerian name of Festspielhaus – was an apt backdrop for Dalcrozian fantasies of classical Greek social harmony. Its construction was a significant undertaking, and during one of Le Corbusier's visits to Hellerau in 1911, he was invited to join the project as an employee of Tessenow.

He eventually declined the offer, apparently fearing that he would not be given significant design responsibility, but not before befriending Dalcroze and marveling at the aesthetic synthesis effected by Appia and Salzmann. His decision not to associate himself professionally with the Eurhythmic enterprise seems prescient in light of the Institute's forced closure just three years later. After World War I, Dalcroze started a new school in Geneva, but it never became a similar hothouse of cultural experimentation. Should Hellerau

th
be located, then, at the dawn of the 20 century, or

at the sunset of the 'long' 19th? It could be viewed, after all, as one more artist colony, a late Jugendstil flowering of the old Romantic project to unite art and life. To some who have viewed it through the lens of the ensuing years, Dalcroze's experiment appears dessicated of critical energy by a character of escapist, even wilfully naive optimism. It never shared the themes of metropolitan alienation and sexual angst often found in Expressionism, and it certainly lacked the nihilistic underside of Dada and similar postwar avant-garde movements.

Yet its influence was felt across the new century, helping to inspire a culture of bodily expression in Europe that included the dances of Isadora Duncan, Mary Wigman, and Rudolf Laban, the mysticism of Rudolf Steiner and George Gurdjieff, and the program of theatrical study and performance at the Bauhaus. More profoundly, Hellerau introduced an immanent mysticism for the modern age, one based on corporeality rather than spirituality; it ordained a new kind of theatrical performance based on a spatial synthesis of light and music rather than mimesis; and perhaps most significantly for architecture, it established a powerful ethical foundation for the modernist project of abstraction.

This was its most immediate significance for Le Corbusier, whose designs immediately began undergoing a process of reduction that would lead, in a few more years, to Purism. After the War, the legacy of Dalcroze remained a powerful influence on the architect, and he even attended a one year course in the Parisian Eurhythmics school founded by his brother Albert – which continued
the project of Eurhythmic music education much as the Dalcroze Society UK does today. Le Corbusier's later pursuit of the enigmatic aesthetic quality he called 'acoustique plastique' harks back to Dalcroze's practice of plastique rythmique, and to the shared project of aesthetic cultivation through an innovative Gesamtkunstwerk of body, space, and light.