The First Formal Dalcroze Instruction in the United States: Placido de Montoliu and His Work at the Phebe Anna Thorne Model School

Abstract

It was 1913 when the first school in America adopted Dalcroze Eurhythmics as a course within its academic curriculum. Dalcroze's system was already being embraced enthusiastically throughout Europe at the time. One might not have expected that America's first Eurhythmics students would be a group of fifteen nine-year-old girls at an open-air model school founded at a Quaker college in a quiet suburb in Pennsylvania. In considering the transcontinental dissemination of a world-renowned music teaching system, one envisions auditioned students at a music conservatory or an institute for performing arts in the heart of one of America's largest cities. Nevertheless, Bryn Mawr College was the first American institution to bring a first-generation, Dalcroze-trained instructor to America and integrate Eurhythmics fully into its academic curriculum. (1) In the fall of 1913, Placido de Montoliu, a Spaniard who served as an assistant to Emile Jaques-Dalcroze for three years, was recruited from the Jaques-Dalcroze College of Rhythmic Training in Hellerau, Germany, to teach Dalcroze Eurhythmics to young girls at the Phebe Anna Thorne Model School within Bryn Mawr College. It would be nine more years before Bryn Mawr would establish a music program within its college curriculum, thirteen more years before the program would become endowed. (2) Swiss educator and musician Emile Jaques-Dalcroze (1865-1950) developed Eurhythmics in an effort to reform the system of music education; he did not feel the existing system in Geneva was preparing students to be musical. Generally speaking, Dalcroze defined the aim of Eurhythmics to be bodily representation of musical values. (3) He elaborated: Education by, and in rhythm aims, before all else, at producing in the student a psycho-physical sensibility, calculated at once to create the need and furnish the means of spontaneously externalizing musical rhythms genuinely felt, and interpreting them by any means inspired by a perfect knowledge of the relations of space, time, and weight. (4) The circumstances of Eurhythmics instruction at Bryn Mawr College are intriguing because: 1) Bryn Mawr was founded as a Quaker college, a religion in which the arts were discouraged and disapproved of; 2) Bryn Mawr's first Eurhythmics students were nine-year-old girls; 3) the Phebe Anna Thorne School, where the instruction took place, was an open-air learning school; and 4) the Eurhythmics instruction was an integral component of the academic curriculum at Phebe Anna Thorne at a time when no formal music instruction was offered to Bryn Mawr College students and music was not part of the college curriculum. M. Carey Thomas, the second president of Bryn Mawr College, actively sought out a Dalcroze instructor and recruited Placido de Montoliu in Europe with a specific position and curricular purpose in mind. She sent Dr. Matilde Castro, newly hired from London, to direct the Phebe Anna Thorne School and to travel through Europe to seek out the newest, most progressive teaching methods. (5) A letter to President Thomas, on Munich hotel stationery, describes Matilde Castro traveling by train to Hellerau to learn more about the new method of music teaching. Within only a few months, Montoliu was contracted and en route to Bryn Mawr to work with young girls at the Phebe Anna Thorne School in its inaugural year. The Setting Founded in 1885 as a Quaker college for women, Bryn Mawr was specifically affiliated with the Gurneyite-Orthodox Society of Friends. The college's founder, Joseph Taylor, and its board of trustees, hoped to model its mission and curriculum on Haverford College, the first college founded by Gurneyite-Orthodox Quakers in the United States. Haverford is located near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; the college was founded in 1833 for male students and became coeducational in 1980. (6) Carey Thomas guided Bryn Mawr in another direction, however, when she was promoted from dean of the faculty to president in 1894. …