Chapter 3: Body Movement

I look forward to a system of musical education in which the body itself shall play the role of the intermediary between sounds and thought. 

- Emile Jaques-Dalcroze [1]

We live in a society which gives our bodies short shrift. We exercise less than ever before in our history. We eat more, and we eat worse. 

Pity the children who grow up in this culture. From younger and younger ages they are removed from the real world. At a time when their bodies are still growing, when they should be out in the world running, jumping, climbing and rolling, we instead seat them still in chairs, at desks. Whenever we tell them to “walk properly”, “stand up straight”, “don’t climb that tree”, “stop rolling in the mud”, we are counteracting their natural instincts, and interfering with the way their bodies are hard-wired to develop. We can carry these values into our adult life and perpetuate them, ending up with bodies which are tense, de-sensitised and inflexible, because we have forgotten how to use them properly. 

Our task as music teachers, therefore, must be to help develop our students’ physical sensitivity and flexibility. There are four main musical reasons for this: 

First, the whole functioning of the body depends upon the flexibility of the centre, the torso. If the torso is rigid, then so too will be the arms, the hands, and the fingers. Instrumental technique begins, therefore, at the centre. It is our responsibility as teachers to help all our students achieve this flexibility and freedom of movement. 

Second, rhythm is nothing more than the expression in sound of physical movement. And if our bodies cannot feel rhythmic movement because they are tense and clumsy, then they will never be able to play rhythmically on an instrument. That is why whole-body movement is an indispensable part of any child’s musical education. 

Third, the body is a channel for musical memory. So many things in music are remembered in the muscles far better than in the intellect. If we use this capacity of the body to help our students to internalise the music they learn, then we can deepen and enrich their experience and understanding. 

Fourth, but perhaps most importantly, the body is bearer of the quality of sound. Music is not just about singing accurately and in tune. In some senses, correct in-tune notes are merely the superficial appearance of music. To develop deep musical roots, we need to develop “feeling” for music. Weight, flow, direction, purpose, emotion: all these we can instinctively express through their bodies. We need to develop this sense, not crush it. 

All good movement, like all good singing, starts at the centre. It is a decent enough thing to clap hands or tap knees in time with music, or to sing action songs, or to play body percussion games – but it is better by far, and ultimately more natural for children, to feel music with their bodies moving through space. Tiny children who have only just learned to stand do this naturally, by standing flat-footed, legs beneath their hips (i.e. not together), their head balanced on their shoulders, with flexible knees, bouncing their torsos (i.e. their centres) up and down to the music. 

This completely natural and unselfconscious action is the blueprint for all good education in music and movement. Whatever else a child does, if his body is balanced and bouncing on flexible knees, he will be educating himself in the meaning and feeling of musical pulse. 

He will also be perfectly poised to jump. 

Jumping 

Try this little experiment: Listen to a piece of music, and decide that you are going to play a single note (or beat a drum, or clap your hands, or sing a note) on a particular beat of that piece (perhaps the first note of a section). Then do it. That’s all. 

Now think through some of the processes you had to go through to perform this apparently simple task. First, you had to make some kind of preparation: perhaps a breath in, perhaps a lift of the arm. Then, you had to listen carefully to judge when the beat was coming. You had to time your beat to coincide with the beat in the music. If you were too hasty in your preparation, you might have arrived early, or had to hang around with your arm in the air or your lungs full a bit longer than was comfortable or natural. If you were too late, you probably had to cut short your preparation. Either way, bad timing will have had a deleterious effect on the quality of the sound you made. Then (and I hope you didn’t forget to do this) you had to control the rest of your sound, sustaining it, controlling it, and ending it when you wanted to. 

Every musical sound has three parts: a preparation (anacrusis), a beat (crusis), and an after-sound (metacrusis, or my favourite German word Nachklang). If you sing a note, you have to breathe in, start the sound, and then consciously control it. If you play a note on the piano, you have to lift your arm, strike the key, and then decide how and when to lift off. If you hit a note on a gamelan, you have to lift your beater, strike the key, and then decide whether to let the note ring or to dampen it at a certain point. Therefore, to make any musical sound demands a threefold sense of timing in the body: in advance, at the moment, and afterwards. 

Children need to develop this threefold sense before they reach the stage of learning an instrument. The flat-footed little toddler, bouncing on flexible knees, is already beginning to do so. By flexing and then straightening his knees, he makes an anacrusis. When he comes down next, he makes a beat. He can then choose to make a short metacrusis by staying down, or to extend it by following through his beat and coming up again. 

Now try the little experiment above again, but by jumping and landing on the beat rather than playing it. If you are wearing shoes or socks, you may notice a problem. In order to jump, you need flexible but secure feet. If you are wearing shoes, your feet cannot flex or feel the ground. So take them off. If you are wearing socks, you may notice another problem: you don’t have the firm grip on the floor which jumping demands. So take them off too. 

Now try the experiment again, in bare feet. Now you have both the flexibility and security in your feet which this task demands. Therefore, it is always a bad idea to try to move to music when you have anything on your feet. We were made to be barefoot, because, quite apart from music, our bodies meet the world in our feet. Most people in the world live their lives barefoot. Shoes are the blindfolds for the feet. When we don’t need them (e.g. to keep our feet warm outside in the winter), we should take them off. And our children especially, who still have the natural body flexibility with which they were created, should be encouraged to go barefoot as much as possible, especially when they are making music. 

Now try the experiment again. Do you notice how it accentuates and clarifies the whole threefold process? Now it is your whole body making the music, not just your arm or your voice. The anacrusis in particular demands a sophisticated sense of timing, because it demands a preparation to the preparation, by bending the knees before pushing up. This is why jumping to music is such an excellent training in musical timing. 

The by-product of this is that it helps to maintain in children a relaxed but poised, fully flexible body, which is essential not only for good instrumental technique but for a healthy life in general. Toddlers, when they bend down to pick something up, naturally bend their knees fully, keep their head in alignment with their torso, and stay rooted on flat feet. Throughout most of the world, people maintain this flexibility as they grow: this after all is how most people in the world go to the toilet! However, our children, subjected to the dysfunctional rigours of modern living, can sadly lose such flexibility – which can lead to so many of the muscular-skeletal problems we have as grown-ups. We should not let this happen, and incorporating bending, squatting, bouncing and jumping into our music teaching will help this. 

Essential to this is proper control of the head. J. M. Alexander, originator of the Alexander Technique, recognised how the head is the key to the rest of the body. Good instrumental and vocal teachers will also know this. We should not wait until children start to learn instruments before we start to train them to maintain (or regain) the superb sense of head placement they had as toddlers. 

The head is essential to the process of bouncing or jumping. Therefore, it is essential to developing a sense of musical timing. If a child’s head is bent down, he has a collapsed body. He will not be able to jump efficiently, and therefore his sense of musical timing will be affected. If he is encouraged to keep his head free and balanced (“floating”) on top of his torso, then his jump will go up and come down when it wants to. His whole sense of pulse will benefit. 

Walking

We have already spoken about the important of flexible feet to jumping. The same can said for walking. Feet in shoes cannot flex, and cannot feel the ground; therefore, bare feet are essential if we are to use walking to develop children’s sense of different kinds of pulse. 

Try this little experiment: Listen to a variety of pieces of music, and walk to them – barefoot, of course. And notice what you are doing. That’s all. 

Some kinds of music, you will notice, do not give you a strong sense of pulse; therefore they do not demand that your feet express the pulse when you walk. Your instinct is to walk through the music, rather than to step on the beats. In this case, the music pulls the weight of your torso forward rather than downward. The feet roll gently (if you are barefoot) so that your weight transfers from one leg to the next smoothly and continuously. Your feet merely stop you falling over; they do not feel the need to keep the pulse. 

Other kinds of music have a stronger pulse, giving you more of a more downward feel. Your feet will still be flexing as you move forward, but they will probably be somewhat flatter, as you emphasise the pulse. 

And some music is very much stamping music. Here, the instinct will be principally downward; you might even instinctively stop moving forward to concentrate on the heavy downward pulse. Your knees will bend more, so as to enable you to beat downward with your feet – which will probably be very flat, striking the ground as a whole, without flexing. 

Our feet, therefore, are one of the best expressive tools for learning musicality. How our feet meet the ground is so important for expressing how we interpret music. 

Curves

We have spoken a lot so far about the feet, and about the head. Let us look at now what is in-between: the torso. 

Adult torsos in the modern world are often stiff. Whether we stand straight or slouch, our aches and pains give away the tension in our bodies. We need to give children every opportunity to maintain relaxed, flexible torsos. 

They do this naturally, of course, if we let them: climbing, rolling, stretching, tumbling. And they instinctively walk that way too: rarely in straight lines, but weaving their way through the world in what looks to us like a chaotic and undignified manner. It is only adults who say, “Walk straight!” or “Sit still!” And it is only adults who see any point in removing children from the real world, full as it is of interesting shapes and curved paths, to put them into square classrooms crowded with educational baggage to trip over. 

If we are serious about maintaining children’s body flexibility (and, as music teachers, we must be), then free, curved movement should be an essential part of their music education. Therefore, when singing songs we should spend a lot of time not walking in straight lines or well-ordered circles, but in free curved paths, either with each child choosing his own path among and in-between all the others, or weaving in and out of each other’s paths, perhaps holding hands in line dances. 

Curved paths are perhaps a good metaphor for children’s development. Educational development, if we permit it, is not a linear process. Children know this instinctively. It is only adult-generated educational systems which pretend otherwise, and which think that the best way to produce results is always to take the direct route. Good music education, therefore, is about re-emphasising the beauty of the process, not just the product; the journey, not just the goal. 

We return, therefore, to Alexander. One of the many pieces of wisdom J. M. Alexander left us concerns the danger of “end-gaining”, i.e. of being so focussed on the product that we forget the process: 

When a person has reached a given stage of unsatisfactory use and functioning, his habit of “end-gaining” will prove to be the impeding factor in all his attempts to profit by any teaching method whatsoever. [2]                   

Or, as Eugen Herrigel puts it in his marvellous book Zen in the Art of Archery: 

The more obstinately you try to learn how to shoot the arrow for the sake of hitting the goal, the less you will succeed in the one and the further the other will recede. [3] 

This is also perhaps a good metaphor for how we ought to live our lives in general. Surely even we adults (perhaps especially we adults) need to allow our life-paths to curve more, and to follow straight goal-oriented lines less. We need to dare to freely explore the world around us, with curiosity for the unpredictable places we may find ourselves. That might be good for our imaginative and emotional intelligence, don’t you think? And that too might make us better musicians!

---

[1] Emile Jaques-Dalcroze, Rhythm Music & Education (Dalcroze Soc., London, 1980), p. 4 

[2] F. M. Alexander, The Use of the Self (Orion, London, 2001), p. 66

[3] Eugen Herrigel, Zen in the Art of Archery (Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1982), pp. 46-47

**********************************************************************

© 2025 Nikhil Dally
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author.