The musical wing of eurythmy, where pitch, beat and interval are made visible as movements of the human body.
Tone eurythmy is the musical side of the movement-art Rudolf Steiner developed, in which the inner experience of a piece of music is carried over into the gestures of arms, hands and feet. A rising melody lifts the arms; a falling melody draws them down; the beat lives in the stepping of right and left. It is singing turned into visible motion.
Tone Eurythmy in Anthroposophy is the musical branch of Rudolf Steiner's movement-art, in which the inner experience of singing is made visible through the moving human body. Where speech eurythmy renders the sounds of language as gesture, tone eurythmy renders the elements of the tone-world: pitch becomes the rising and falling of the arms, beat is carried by the right-and-left of stepping, and the interval is felt as the soul's distance between two tones. Steiner gave its decisive form in the Dornach lectures of February 1924, published as Eurythmy as Visible Singing (GA 278). The eurythmist does not illustrate the music but lives inside it, letting melody, harmony and rhythm pass over into bodily movement. Today it is practised on the performance stage and as a strand of eurythmy therapy.
In Steiner's Own Words
When the human being carries musical experience over into eurythmy, he carries it into movement. And he has no choice in his movements but to enter, in some way or other, into these three different directions. He has to find some way of making use of these three directions if the musical element is to be carried into movement, for they represent him and [all] his possibilities of movement. In eurythmy [all] the human possibilities of movement should become apparent.
What it Means Today
Steiner's name for this discipline was simple: musical eurythmy, the movement-art of the tone-world, the bodily revelation of interval and beat. A century after the 1924 lectures it is still taught in this spirit. At the Goetheanum in Dornach, the eurythmy section trains performers who study music and movement together, so that a sung phrase and its eurythmic form are learned as one thing rather than two. The craft rests on a small number of exact correspondences that Steiner worked out across the February 1924 cycle. The three dimensions of space each receive one musical element: the up-and-down of the arms carries pitch, with the ascending line read as ethos and the descending line as pathos; the right-and-left of the step carries the beat; the front-and-back works inwardly with the phrase. The interval, the gap the singer feels between one tone and the next, is shaped as the size and reach of the movement between two gestures. None of this is mime. The eurythmist is not picturing a violin or acting out a mood; the movement is meant to be the same gesture the tone itself would make if it could be seen. Within eurythmy therapy, the same vocabulary is turned toward healing, since Steiner held that the moving arm is an outer image of the inner organs of breathing and song, so that work with tone can reach the throat and chest. What separates tone eurythmy from its sister-art, speech eurythmy, is its raw material: not the consonants and vowels of the spoken word, but the living substance of melody, harmony and rhythm.
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