Carl Orff (1895 - 1982) & His Schulwerk
Source: Orff-Schulwerk: Applications for the Classroom, by Brigitte Warner, Prentice-Hall, 1991
Born in 1895 in Munich, Carl Orff began piano studies at the age of five under the tutelage of his mother. The boy's great interest in language and poetry were fostered in school, where classical languages and literature were among his favorite studies. He received his formal musical training at the Akademie der Tonkunst in Munich. From 1915 to 1917, Orff was musical director of the Munich Kammerspiele, an experience that had a profound effect on his later work. Upon the advice of his mentor and friend Curt Sachs, he soon immersed himself in the study of Renaissance and early Baroque composers, most notably Claudio Monteverdi. In 1923 he met Dorothee Gunther, who envisioned the founding of a school for movement, dance, and rhythmic training. The idea of a training in elemental music - a music which is not abstract, but which integrates the elements of speech, movement, and dance - emerged and took shape in his discussions with Gunther. In 1924 they founded the Guntherschule in Munich. Core studies, taught by several instructors, included gymnastics and dance. As musical director, Orff was responsible for the musical training of the students.
Orff began with rhythm as the basic element inherent in music, dance, and speech, combining them and unifying them into one language. Improvisation and creation were at the center of his teaching. Because a number of his students had not had previous musical training, he emphasized body sounds and gestures for rhythm, and he used the voice as the first and most natural of instruments. He gave great importance to the drum in all its variations of size, shape, and sound. He made the ostinato (a repeated rhythmic, spoken or sung pattern) serve as the form-giving element in all improvisations. Gunild Keetman and the dancer Maja Lex joined the school as students in 1926 and 1925 respectively. Orff regarded both of them as gifted equally in music and in dance; soon they became colleagues and partners in his search for an elemental expression in music and dance. Keetman's collaboration in particular proved to be of immense value in the development of the instrumental ensemble and its musical style. During the late 20's, with the invaluable help of Karl Maendler, the barred instruments (which today are simply referred to as "Orff instruments") were designed and built for the school. In 1930 Lex and Keetman founded a dance group and orchestra with students of the Guntherschule which became widely known in Germany and abroad. That same year saw the appearance of the first publications. Orff was well aware that publishing brought with it the danger that the purpose of the books would be misunderstood. Born out of improvisation, the fluid medium of elemental music does not adapt well to the static medium of print. On the other hand, he realized that only through publication could its educational value be made known.
Beginning in 1931, lectures, demonstrations, and training courses began to draw the attention of music educators in Germany to the work at the Guntherschule. But during the 1930's and 40's, Orff's approach to music pedagogy was declared in conflict with the prevailing ideological and political climate in Germany. A number of his published works were dropped from publication because he had used poems by writers no longer acceptable. In 1944 the Guntherschule was closed due to political pressure; the building and most of its inventory were completely destroyed by bombing. Between 1935 and 1942 Orff created his first "mature" stage works: Carmina Burana and the two Grimms' fairy tales Der Mond and Die Kluge . These works are of direct interest to the Schulwerk teacher because of their stylistic relationship to the musical language of Orff Schulwerk.
After the War, Orff was contacted by the Bavarian Broadcasting Company and asked whether he could create a series of broadcasts for and with children. His initial doubts were soon replaced with enthusiasm, realizing that the task would renew his long-abandoned dream of music education reform. He engaged Gunild Keetman to assist in the planning and to work with the children. In September, 1948 the first program was aired. Teachers, parents, and children demanded more, and an extended series was presented. Between 1950 and 1954, Orff and Keetman wrote down the pedagogical concepts that had grown out of their work with children. When they had finished, they had written five volumes: Schulwerk, in its re-creation and transformation, had become Music for Children. Radio broadcasts lacked the possibility of including the movement aspect, fundamental to rhythmic development. In 1949 Keetman was invited to teach children's courses at the Mozarteum in Salzburg, Austria. Now movement training could be systematically incorporated into Orff Schulwerk. By 1953, comprehensive teacher-training courses were offered at the Mozarteum. In 1963 the Orff Institute was opened; still a branch of the Mozarteum, it functions today as an international training center as well as the focal point for Orff Schulwerk all over the world. At the core of Carl Orff's work is a kind of musical expression that is able to speak to children without the loss of musical integrity. Therein lies its great significance, its genius.
Gunild Keetman (1904 - 1991)
Source: Discovering Keetman, by Jane Frazee; SchottWe are fortunate that in recent years the many musical accomplishments of Gunild Keetman have begun to receive the attention they deserve. Born in Germany in 1904, Keetman's musical environment was rich with possibilities. Her parents were great music lovers and provided her with a solid musical education. A family quartet performed regularly and frequent concert attendance was the norm.
Keetman's parents also had high academic expectations for their daughter even including a university education. At that time such an attainment for a woman would have been remarkable under even the best of circumstances. It was even more so when we remember that Germany in the early 1920s was close to unravelling from the intense economic pressures following the disaster of the Great War. But despite these obstacles, Keetman did go off to the University of Bonn in 1923 only to drop out and transfer the following year to Berlin. Apparently the curriculum and general orientation of these two institutions were not to her liking for she spent only a semester at each. We can only imagine the family's response to her decision to withdraw not once but twice. Despite these setbacks she continued to search for a more appropriate musical education.
It was then, in 1926 at the age of twenty-two, that she made what was almost certainly the key decision of her life; she enrolled in the school newly created by Carl Orff and Dorothee Günther in Munich. The Güntherschule, as it was called, had been established in 1924, near the end of what Karl Toepfer calls "the strangest, most expressive, and most experimental period of German modern dance". Günther and Orff wanted to both synthesize some of those experimental approaches and move beyond them with their own. In doing so they made the Güntherschule part of the powerful revolt against the German version of Victorianism. This protest had begun at the end of the nineteenth century and would continue through the rest of the Weimar years. What made this uprising so engaging, compelling - and frightening - was its combination of rejection, discovery and idealism. Modern dance, with its emphasis on human passions and inner experience, especially embodied this protest; that is why it appealed so deeply to expressionist artists like Kirchner and Nolde and why they and others so often made dance the subject of their work.
In this challenging environment Keetman at last found a home, one that was probably beyond her wildest dreams. Specifically, there was the stimulation of new approaches to music and dance which heightened their integration to the point that musicians and dancers were interchangeable; even the instruments, often of new design, became part of the choreography. And then there were the new colleagues. Günther was a particularly valuable associate for she had years of teaching experience in a variety of modern dance and movement pedagogies. There was also the extraordinary Maja Lex, an electrifying dancer whose broad impact was probably exceeded only by Mary Wigman.
Keetman, in a classic example of being at the right place at the right time, flourished in this very new world. In only four years, by the age of just twenty-six, she had moved from university drop-out to composer, author, teacher and international performer. In all of these areas she was doing important, well-received work. In 1930, for instance, when Günther founded the Tanzgruppe Günther, Keetman composed all the music for Lex's choreography. They enjoyed instant success and were flooded with offers to tour. This brilliant beginning culminated six years later at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. There her dance compositions were performed by thousands of children before an international audience to the warmest applause.
Perhaps it was these successes and others like them that led Keetman to remain in Germany in the late 1930s. The fact that her work was deeply rooted in Munich and in her associations with fellow German colleagues (who also remained) must have played an important role as well. But whatever the explanation, Keetman's decision to stay eventually had significant consequences for her musical career.
Keetman had, throughout her twenties and early thirties, been able to avoid the tensions swirling about Europe in the interwar years. In fact, her multifaceted career had no doubt flourished beyond her wildest expectations. But now, in the late 1930s and especially in the early 1940s, she began to experience the disasters that many had already undergone and which now awaited Germany. The culmination came in 1945 when the Güntherschule in Munich was obliterated in an Allied air-raid. She was forty and the one major institution with which she had been associated for almost her entire adult life lay in ruins. She responded to that disaster by going with a colleague to see if anything could be salvaged only to discover that the situation was utterly hopeless. Some years later she described her reaction to a friend: "We had our recorders with us; we could not do anything but make music together. In that moment, we played out our entire misery and sadness. I believe that when we finally stopped playing, we had played ourselves a little courage."
Keetman used that courage to inaugurate her second musical career, one that would last for over forty years almost to the year of her death in 1990 at the age of eighty-six. Initially, in the 1920s and 1930s, Keetman composed for and performed almost entirely with adults. Her concertizing abroad to, for instance, the United States and France, also used adult materials for adult audiences. Her teaching as well was for the most part centered on older students. Now, in the aftermath of World War II, the focus of her teaching and composing shifted entirely to much younger students. Beginning in 1948 Keetman began to overcome the three obstacles that confront any new approach to education. To begin with, people - especially teachers and administrators - must be informed. Her 1948 broadcasts over Bavarian radio began in a small way to do just that. In the years that followed she saw to it that teachers and administrators the world over would come to know of the approaches she and Orff had developed. In 1962, for instance, she went abroad to instruct others in the new techniques. Through film, records and television she did much not only to tell, but also to show, the effectiveness and artistry of the Schulwerk approach.
Second, any new method will need new materials and these Keetman also began to provide in 1948 when she and Orff wrote and composed "The Christmas Story," their stage piece in Bavarian dialect to be sung and acted by Bavarian children. A much more important example of new materials was the publication in 1950-1954 of the five volume edition of "Music for Children." As the years passed she reached out to an international audience, seeing to it that teachers in many countries had materials appropriate to the abilities of their students. Keetman continued providing such literature throughout her life. In fact, it is these compositions that are very likely to be remembered as her single most important contribution to the success of Orff-Keetman musical instruction.
Keetman also made an important contribution to overcoming the third obstacle to the broad success of any new educational approach: the teaching of teachers. Beginning in the 1950s she herself began that process. By the end of the decade she was this abroad and, in 1961, in the new home of the Orff Schulwerk in Salzburg she inaugurated the international summer courses. So began the steady stream of teachers to Austria determined to experience at first hand her teaching insights. There is no better testimony to her great skill in this work than the ease with which one can find teachers who credit her with a profound effect upon their lives.
The central aim of Gunild Keetman's second musical life was to be educationally useful. Through her demonstrations, instructions and compositions she stands as the very embodiment of such usefulness. The tens of thousands of students and teachers who have either directly or indirectly been touched by her work would readily agree. This collection is an attempt to offer a small sample of the many volumes of material she provided as musical models for music educators throughout the world, and it is offered as a personal tribute to her important contribution to us all.
See also: Gunild Keetman, A life dedicated to music and movement, by Hermann Regner and Minna Ronnefeld; English translation by Margaret Murray; Schott 2004
