[2] In 1910, with the help of German industrialist Wolf Dohrn, Dalcroze founded a school at Hellerau, outside Dresden, dedicated to the teaching of his method.
Many musicians flocked to Hellerau, among them Prince Serge Wolkonsky, Vera Alvang (Griner), Valeria Cratina, Jelle Troelstra (son of Pieter Jelles Troelstra), Inga and Ragna Jacobi, Albert Jeanneret (Le Corbusier's brother), Jeanne de Salzmann, Mariam Ramberg, Anita Berber, Gertrude Price Wollner,[3] and Placido de Montelio.
[5] In 1881, he was part of the Belles-Lettres Literary Society, a student group dedicated to acting, writing, and performing music, theatre, and opera.
In contact with this kind of music, Dalcroze noticed that there were different worlds of rhythmic expression, each of which would require a particular way of writing, as well as a unique performance style.
Many great exponents of modern dance in the twentieth century spent time at the school, including Kurt Jooss and Hanya Holm, Rudolf Laban, Maria Rambert, Uday Shankar, and Mary Wigman.
[9] Dalcroze returned to Geneva in 1914 and opened the Institut Jaques-Dalcroze, which continues to provide professional training to the present day.
First, he questioned why music theory and notation were taught as abstractions, dissociated from sound, movements, and feelings that they represented.
Moreover, by taking the pianist as an example, he asked how the finger technique taught by professors could be considered a complete musical education.
[citation needed] Moreover, he noticed that students would change their movements when following a crescendo, and would respond physically to the accents of the music.
They were not able to hear harmonies that they wrote in the music theory classes, and they could not create simple melodies and chord sequences.
His aim was to find ways to help students to develop skills to feel, hear, create, imagine, connect, memorize, read, and write, as well as perform and interpret music.
He was convinced that the combination of intense listening and the responses of the body would generate and release a powerful musical force.
Thus, he worked on a new series of exercises designed to help students strengthen their perception by the metric and its instincts by many streams of the movement, called rhythm.
Therefore, he deduced that people still had trouble reaching the goal of speed, accuracy, and performance by being rhythmically expressive.
The motions approached by Dalcroze were: movements, postures, and gestures to express the tempo, duration, dynamics, accents, and other elements that produce rhythmic material.