A Detailed Report by Kate Reese Hurd
First posted in December 2019
Extensively revised in March 2023
First third of PART I
“The Archetypal Scale and Its Disappearance – A Memoir”
Accompanied by two music manuscripts introducing new methods for showing tonal relationships:
J.S. Bach, Chorale BWV 367
Jean Marie Leclair, Sarabande
This revision of the first third of this PART I memoir was made necessary because of the evolution of my understanding of the processes of modulation. It is not a matter of the 4th of the existing scale raising or the 7th lowering. Instead, a new role opens up which redefines all of the existing scale relationships and allows the music to move to a new tonal center. A pitch-tone which is not serving in a role in the existing scale enters for the sake of opening up this necessary role in the scale to which the piece is modulating. The roles are everything!
Also, my studies of the earliest records (available now in German) that were made by the eurythmists who attended Rudolf Steiner’s August 1915 presentations of the angle-gestures, have made it possible for me to address his use of the word ‘tone’ more effectively. I also realized that other sections of my PART I of the report were not yet clear enough. I certainly hope that I have done a better job of it now! My articles on the earliest records have come out in both the EANA and Performing Arts Section newsletters; so this revision and re-posting could not wait.
Our musical notation rightly focusses on the matter of showing clearly what the musician has to do to sound the correct pitch-tones, in order to play the music. But these notational conventions are the source of a great deal of grief for the art of eurythmy. For our responsibility is to bring the formative structuring of music to expression, which Steiner called the “Tongebilde” (note: the Compton-Burnett team translated this word properly where it appears in Eurythmy as Visible Singing at the opening of Lecture I). Never did he mean to encode individual pitches as angle-gestures. I can find no record of such an intention as that on his part. Only in the living, formative relationships between the pitch-tones is music to be experienced. But I would like to suggest that even this statement is not accurate. This livingness of music involves the qualities of relationship that arise in the tonal musical scale; and it is solely these qualities of relationship, which define and affirm each other, which constitute the scale-Gebilde in its entirety. When these relationships are directly experienced, there is no need for reference to pitch-tones at all; for the relationships which are holding sway in any given moment are all the musical grounding we ever need in tonal music. We can then let go completely of the material-audible aspect.
Great effort over many decades has been applied, to try to manage our art without placing the roles and relationships that belong to the tonal scale at the very heart of our expression of music. We have placed pitch-tone expression in the center, and have tried to compensate for this by incorporating references to the life-blood of tonal relationships, as a kind of apology for eclipsing these relationships so thoroughly. As our colleague Reinhard Wedemeier declared in the Performing Arts Section Newsletter, Nr 76 for Easter 2022, this is indeed “the primary catastrophe in tone eurythmy.” These angle-gestures as presented by Rudolf Steiner in 1915 are not tone angles. In their absolute gesture-essence, they are tonal angles: they express relationships. We must be moving toward really experiencing these remarkable relationships in the tonal pieces that we work with and present, so that we know where we are in this inaudible tonal-Gebilde at every moment and can grow to express it. The exercises which I provide in PART IV of this SINGING AND JUMPING OPENS THE WAY report can do much to help us to enter and experience these relationships clearly and securely. They are the life-blood of tonal music; and they need to be likewise the life-blood of our expression of that music. (PART IV was posted in March 2022.)
I hope that my articles and reports concerning our practice of music eurythmy and about the formative structuring of music, the music-Gebilde, will help to shine light on our plight and show us how to surmount this situation. I plan to establish a website for my work this year, where colleagues will be able find my articles, updates, additions and my writings on other topics more easily.
Dear reader, please remember to take your time and gently pace yourself with the body of work posted here, which aims to delve far below the surface of both music and eurythmy movement, in order to bring new understanding, healing and fresh impulses into our efforts now for the sake of our art.
Wishing you many blessings on your journey,
Kate Reese Hurd
karehuuu@gmail.com
MusicEurythmyReport,KRH,032823,FirstThirdPartOne,Disappearance,pdf
BachChorale367,KRH,032723,Annotated,pdf
BachChorale367,KRH,032723,Plain,pdf
LeclairSarabande,KRH,032723,Annotated,pdf
LeclairSarabande,KRH,032723,Plain,pdf