ORFF

Carl Orff is equally famous as a composer and as an educator. His masterwork, Carmina Burana, is part of the standard choral repertory, and has become familiar to millions through its frequent use as background music for films and television commercials. As an educator, Orff devised the Schulwerk, a comprehensive system of musical education that remains in use throughout the world.

Orff was born on July 10, 1895, in Munich, Bavaria, where his father, an army officer, was stationed. He began piano studies with his mother at the age of five and continued at the Akademie der Tonkunst. Upon graduation, he became director of the Munich Chamber Orchestra, a group that had a particular interest in the study and performance of music written before the time of Bach. He served in the German military in 1917–18, and moved back to Munich in 1919.

GÜNTHERSCHULE

In 1923, he met Dorothee Günther, who shared his dream of creating a school that would impart musical instruction to children in a natural way, rather than through traditional academic training. Together, they founded the Güntherschule in Munich in 1924. He felt that rhythmic training should underlie all musical instruction. (Orff’s own feeling for the importance of rhythm in music is strikingly demonstrated by the syncopations and ostinato beat of sections of the Carmina Burana.) The realisation of rhythm through speech patterns and body movement, including dance, was the central element of the teaching and a group of dancers from the school toured Germany in the 1930s.

Students at the Güntherschule first improvised on percussion instruments, which freed them from worry about creating dissonance. For use at the school, Karl Maendler created glockenspiel-like instruments. Schulwerk beginners used the pentatonic scale, which does not have the leading tone of the major and harmonic minor scales in which most classical music is written. Thus, no note determines the next, and the improviser remains free to choose his path at any point. The emphasis on freedom and the publication of works by Jewish writers brought the school under the scrutiny of the Nazi government, and it was closed in 1944. In 1945, bombing destroyed the school, its instruments, and its library.

Since his earliest music training, Orff had composed music. For the Munich Kammerspiele, he adapted Monteverdi’s Orfeo, and he composed Schulwerk to demonstrate the instruments used at the school. Other work showed the influence of BARTÓK and STRAVINSKY. However, after the premiere of Carmina Burana in 1937, Orff ordered the publisher to “pulp” all his previous compositions. Carmina Burana is a stunning illustration of the Schulwerk principles. It uses texts from a collection of medieval Latin lyrics and is part of a trilogy also containing Catulli Carmina and The Triumph of Aphrodite. He also composed two operas based on the fairy tales of the Grimm Brothers, Der Mond and Die Kluge.

In 1948, Orff was given the opportunity to do a series of radio programs that demonstrated the Orff Schulwerk. His partner in this was Gunild Keetman, who had been the choreographer of the Güntherschule dance group, and together they documented the Orff Schulwerk in the five-volumes of Musik für Kinder. This work was translated into English and published in England as Music for Children in 1956, and an American edition appeared in 1977.

Orff’s pedagogical methods remain popular, particularly in Austria and the United States. The Orff-Institute opened at the Mozarteum, the prestigious conservatory in Salzburg, in 1963, and the American Orff-Schulwerk Association was founded in 1968. Both institutions are active in the promotion of Orff’s work, as is the Carl Orff Foundation, established when Orff died in 1982.

Jane Prendergast

CARL

ORFF

GÜNTHERSCHULE