About Orff
Looking Back - Looking Forward
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Looking Back - Looking Forward
Paper presented at the 2000 Traunwalchen Symposium
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Fifty years of Orff-Schulwerk: Music for Children gives us time to
feel again the intentions Carl Orff expressed in 1963 as "ideas
placed in time" and to give critical thought to ideas that have been
developing, growing and in flux. At a conference at the newly founded
Orff Institute in 1963, Orff gave a speech entitled: "The Schulwerk
Past and Future".1 What are the underlying intentions that Carl Orff,
well ahead of others at that time, expressed with his collaborators
including Dorothee Gunther and Gunild Keetman and Maja Lex that led
to the development and publishing of the volumes Music for Children ?
What did Orff "wish"? How was it possible that such a concept of
music pedagogy unlike any other spread and extended all over the
world?
In the speech mentioned above, Carl Orff described the Schulwerk
as a "garden of wildflowers", as ideas that lay in the times which
effectively found their suitable ground. He meant that it was a well
known fact that wildflowers flourish strongly while carefully laid
out gardens are often disappointing. Such insight captures the
advantages of the Schulwerk. Those people preferring pure methodology
would have little joy but the artistically inclined and impetuous
improviser would grow. Orff continued: The Schulwerk wants, in all
its phases, to promote self-reliance, to strive to "activate the
student through his own music making, through improvising,
discovering and designing his own music".2 Music that is closely
bound with movement, coming from the unity of speech sound and
movement, should reawaken the need for expression.
To make this effective, Orff set up a suitable instrumentarium
consisting of instruments that were "indigenous and exotic". The way
music was composed for these instruments came from playing them. 3 In
his 1931 publication, Music from Movement, Orff spoke about
improvisation coming from "playing with the instrument". This
penetrating insight describes a back-and-forth dialogue between the
player and the instrument, a dialogue that relates to expressive
playing and the creative process. 4 The only possibility Orff saw for
a new pedagogy was for music education to emerge from movement with
their combined roots of rhythm. It should above all achieve "a strong
influence on building a personality," attainable through a special
form of transmitting a "mode of accomplishment".5
The first volume of Orff-Schulwerk: Music for Children was printed
in 1950, the result of practical work with children at the Bavarian
Broadcasting Company. However, in 1931 an earlier Schulwerk was given
to Schott for printing, based on the experiences at the Guntherschule
(founded in Munich in 1924). It was intended to "introduce a
revolution in music education". This planned edition could not be
published because "the political wave flushed all the ideas in the
Schulwerk away as undesirable and some misunderstandings were washed
up as flotsam and jetsam which delayed its coming into being.6
In the auturnn of 1951 Gunild Keetman began her work with
children's classes at the Mozarteum. Here, according to Orff's
report, she could develop the movement aspects that were not possible
in the radio broadcasts. "Now, for the first time, it was possible to
teach the Schulwerk as we wished to present it".7 Orff's starting
point was that "the unity of music and movement is natural to
children". This fact gave him the key to his work: moving, singing
and playing come together as a unity. This kind of new child-oriented
music education fascinated him. Searching for the lost unity between
movement, music, speaking and singing led Orff to take hold of the
impulses from other cultures in which spontaneous forms of music had
developed with styles of playing in which the physical attachment to
the music was still vivacious. These impulses came to fruition in
both his pedagogical and compositional works.
Interpreting the Schulwerk
- Looking back, could it have been the publication of the
volumes Music for Children that led to a misunderstanding that the
music was a completed "work" in the sense of "opus" by Orff for
teachers? Moreover, the word "school" in the word Schulwerk
(school work) was not considered in its original meaning of
"quietness" and "be at leisure" but was interpreted as "boring
school business".
- These pieces are designed to be understood as models that came
from improvisation and should lead back there again (to one's own
improvisation). However, this idea did not take hold because,
among other things, this demand could not be fulfilled by many
teachers.
- Whoever looks at the volumes to find something contemporary
must be disappointed. However, the volumes remain a document - a
sort of protocol of results - that can be seen as a basis for
improvisation and elemental music making with an abundance of
material.
- If the Schulwerk were to be assessed only on the basis of
notated material, the resulting physical orientation of forms for
transmitting it all would die along the way.
- Orff-Schulwerk is not a method. Except for the remarks at the
end of each volume of Music for Children the teacher does not get
any advice for the pedagogical handling of the material. However
the sequence of the volumes uncovers the approach: coming from
simple elements, from rhythmic and melodic "building blocks"
leading to the whole; from the simple to the complex; from the
pentatonic through modal progressions advancing to cadential
harmonies.
- Metric pieces predominate in the volumes but that does not
mean that rhythm is to be understood as a "rhythmic pattern".
Similarly, the use of bordun and ostinato do not imply that
repetition is always the same.
It is valid to "resume gestures of searching" as Rudolf zur Lippe
said exquisitely at the symposium "A Continuing Heritage" in 1990. To
be involved with Orff-Schulwerk and to accept Music for Children is
to investigate phenomena in sound and movement. This means a study of
sources, examining the social and cultural requirements of the time.
According to Orff, "Time needs its time". This involves having time,
granting time needed for all procedures, and allowing a suitable
amount of time for quietness and perceiving one's own time. And what
does Orff mean when he says, "Don't strike the drum, be the drum"?
Are not such words alone reason enough to reflect, to take on these
"gestures of searching" for the context?
Perhaps you might take a moment and reflect. You are a drum... You
even feel perhaps the nature of the material; you feel the weight,
hardness, pointed or rounded forms, the edge of the frame. Maybe you
are a bass drum, the inside a hollow place; you feel the movement of
air, the vibrating membrane; perhaps you are waiting first to be put
in motion, awaiting the vibration physically; or you feel locked in,
cut off from the outside, anxious about being hit. Perhaps you are
thinking about how much strength will be used for the impact. At this
moment you are activating and bringing forth an enormous treasury of
unspoken experiences making them newly available. You feel
rhythmically moving energy, diving the waves of the vibrations,
diving into a pulsating time. According to Orff, rhythm cannot be
taught. Rhythm is life itself. Rhythm can only be born. 8
Expressions like "being a drum", "being a flute", or "being a
cello" initiate my activity and produce a response with sound,
showing a new perspective from this background. Orff speaks about
being absolutely united with the instrument. 9 This means to be
completely involved with body and soul, diving into the pulsating
process of vibrating, the undulation of movement. For Orff and his
collaborators, movement and sound, along with the materials for
making sounds, were the starting points for one's own experiences,
just as works for newer music took their sources for compositions and
improvisation directly from the structure of sound materials.
Today, are we able to support the 'unity
of speech, music and movement' commanded by Orff'? Is it still as
Orff meant, natural to children?
Living through elemental worlds
Even today we start with the premise that the child catches hold
of objects, grasps them with his/her hand, and "holds on to them"
also in an intellectual sense. We imagine a child who investigates
blocks, sand, mud, dirt, one who investigates his world, searches for
information, fights with problems and resistance, a child who
persists toward practical usage, who wants to work out and try out
his cognition. New research especially in the areas of brain
research, embryology, prenatal psychology and developmental
psychology - acknowledges, supports and confirms our endorsement: the
child adapts his/her view of life in the real world in which
unalterable physical laws are valid.
Our ideal child builds on her cognitive growth in logical
sequences from simple to complex structures building successively on
her view of life. She experiences that time passes, that divisions of
time (getting up, dressing, going out...) are not exchangeable, that
the way from the kitchen to the garden means a spatial change that
also needs time. In the real and tactile environment she learns, with
no trouble at all, how to establish spatial references, to walk and
run through space. She can "scuffle around with material", can shape
it, reshape it and change it.
However, we have overlooked the fact that the video media creates
a second world, a second reality in which the child becomes more and
more distance from the "Alpha world" that is described above. A
generation is growing that is developing its world view rather
passively through the media rather than through active participation
in events. According to Michael Millner, 10 the whole new world of
multi-media creates a second reality for the child, a so-called "Beta
world". Conquering the world physically and intellectually ends
abruptly when the play-pen is too small. It is then that sitting in
front of the screen starts. Very early on, the child becomes
accustomed to the racing flood of pictures, ultimate snatches of
time. The experience of three-dimensional space is missing. The
movement of one's own body through the room is missing. The two
sensory canals of seeing and hearing are wide open, the perceptive
senses of touch and smell are turned off. "Centered looking" is
activated. Missing are the movements of the eye to the periphery of
the field of vision, as well as adapted movements of the head and
body in space.
In stories, children miss the sequence of the plot; the time and
space continuum is chopped up. Computer games reduce play to an
exciting reaction-training game. The computer plays its game with the
child.
In a documentary that was broadcast in 1992, "Walking Backwards
Has To Be Learned", German television brought attention to the
"declining senses" in children of preschool and kindergarten ages.
Children who have never been rocked and who have not balanced
themselves or learned how to manipulate objects are of course in the
minority. However, about one half of all the students in the first
grade are sent to special classes in order to learn the simple basic
movements of skipping, sliding or rocking from side to side. The goal
is not only to master the body but to co-ordinate the senses, the
parallels of physical and mental basics. The most important thesis of
this film is that the coordination of the senses is required for
important intellectual skills.
The latest edition of Orff Schulwerk Informationen (June 2000) 11
is dedicated to the theme "50 Years Music for Children". The
challenge of Orff is the challenge for "many-sided demands" on the
child and adult: many-sided being the transference, from the movement
to the music, from the movement to dance, to speech and then to
language of pictures, to the imagination, the systematic building up
of technique as well as opening the artistic potential; spirit and
soul, "head, heart and hand", the majority of the senses which grasp
the human being in all her/his dimensions.
In addition, Orff encourages a special "mode of accomplishment", a
special kind of transmission. In my opinion, this aspect has not been
given enough attention up to now. Ultimately, it falls to the teacher
whose role it is to guide processes, to solve them or even to accept
them. The main challenge to teachers must be to develop their own
abilities to play, to play with the child and not to "drum around
him". Children are the most wonderful playing partners if we can let
ourselves be involved with them. It is with them that we learn. It is
not in their interests for children to be subjected to constant
"'spoon feeding" according to a pre-structured plan. "Knowing how not
to know" is a part of guiding processes in Orff pedagogy.
Educating people feeds on being attentive to all that is alive,
and is nourished by turning to the child and her possibilities for
expression, his needs, the objects of her strong willed insistence on
having her way, his feelings for form, spontaneity and for what is
creative. Teaching according to the Schulwerk must take seriously the
desire of people to shape their own nature. Teachers must be ready to
relinquish their needs for security and for absolute control. What
Orff pointed out as "wild flowers" - as ideas that "lay in the times"
that "found suitable ground" - are to be transplanted "knowingly" by
us.
References
1. Carl Orff: Das Schulwerk - "Ruckblick und Ausblick" (Looking Back and Looking Forward), in Orff-Institut und der Akademie "Mozarteum Salzburg Jahrbuch 1963. Mainz (Scott) 1964. pp.13-20.
2. Carl Orff, 1964, p. 13 ff
3. Carl Orff, 1964, p.14.
4. Carl Offf, "Music from Movement" in Deutsche
Tonkunsterlerzeitung, 1931.
5. Carl Orff, Memorandum, Wien 1974.
6. Carl Orff, 1964, p.15.
7. idem, p.17.
8. Carl Orff. Documentation vol.3
9. Carl Orff. "Elementare Musikubung, Improvisation and Laienschulung" in Die Musikpflege, vol 6, 1932
10. Michael Millner, Das Beta Kind. Fernsehen und kindliche Entwicklungaus kinderpsychiatrischer Sicht, Bern, 1996.
11. Universitat Mozarteum in Salzburg, Orff Institut und Orff-Schulwerk Forum Salzburg (ed.), Orff Schulwerk Informationen, Nr. 64. Summer, 2000.
