FREE ESSAY ON CARL ORFF'S PHILOSOPHIES IN MUSIC EDUCATION

CARL ORFF'S PHILOSOPHIES IN MUSIC EDUCATION

Carl Orffs philosophies in Music Education
While Carl Orff is a very seminal composer of the 20th century, his greatest success and
influence has been in the field of Music Education. Born on July 10th in Munich, Germany
in 1895, Orff refused to speak about his past almost as if he were ashamed of it. What we
do know, however, is that Orff came 
from a Bavarian family who was very active in the German military. His father's regiment
band would often play through some of the young Orff's first attempts at composing.
Although Orff was adamant about the secrecy of his past, Moser's Musik Lexicon says that
he studied in the Munich Academy of 
Music until 1914. Orff then served in the military in the first world war. After the war,
he held various positions in the Mannheim and Darmstadt opera houses then returned home
to Munich to further study music. In 1925, and for the rest of his life, Orff was the
head of a department and co-founder of the 
Guenther School for gymnastics, music, and dance in Munich where he worked with musical
beginners. This is where he developed his Music Education theories. In 1937, Orff's
Carmina Burana premiered in Frankfurt, Germany. Needless to say, it was a great success.
With the success of Carmina Burana, 
Orff orphaned all of his previous works except for Catulli Carmina and the Entrata which
were rewritten to be acceptable by Orff. One of Orff's most admired composers was
Monteverdi. In fact, much of 
Orff's work was based on ancient material. Orff said: I am often asked why I nearly
always select old material, fairy tales and legends for my stage works. I do not look
upon them as old, but rather as 
valid material. The time element disappears, and only the spiritual power remains. My
entire interest is in the expression of spiritual realities. I write for the theater in
order to convey a spiritual attitude.1 
What Orff is trying to say here is that he does not use old material, but material that
is good enough to be used again. If one eliminates the fact that this material was
written many years ago, then there is nothing to stop that material from being any less
legitimate in recent times. Orff's work in Music Education has been astounding. In the
early 1920's, Orff worked with Mary Wigman. Wigman was a pupil of Emile Jaques-Dalcroze,
another very influential name in Music Education. In fact, Orff's approach 
to music is very similar to Dalcroze's, but Orff focuses on education through percussion
instruments. In 1924, Orff joined Dorthee Guenther and together they founded the Guenther
School. The schools focus was coordinated teaching of gymnastics, dance, and music. Orff
believed that music, movement, and 
speech are not separate entities in and of themselves, but that they form a unity that he
called elemental music. When Orff refers to elemental music, he means the music,
movement, or speech created by children that requires no special training, or in other
words, the things that children do without 
really thinking about it. The basis for the Orff method is the belief that the historical
development of music is reenacted in the life of every individual. This means that, when
a child is young, he is similar to a 
primitive human being - at least musically - in that both are naive and rely primarily on
natural rhythms and movement to make music. Although this theory has not been very widely
accepted by most music educators, this is where the Orff method of teaching music begins.
The Orff method was so impressive to the public that the Ministry of Culture recommended
the adoption of the Guenther-Orff experiments in the elementary schools in Berlin.
Unfortunately, the rise of Hitler and the outbreak of war stunted the growth of these
plans. Finally, in 1948, the German broadcasting authorities urged Orff to resume his
educational activities. The Orff approach, not unlike the Suzuki method, begins with the
idea that music should be learned by a child the same way a language is learned. Suzuki
calls this the mother tongue approach. A child learns to speak simply by listening and
then imitating and then, later in life, the child learns to interpret symbols as a
written form of that language. So, then, a child should learn music in the same way. At
an early age, a child is exposed to music and learns to sing and play percussion
instruments, then, later in the child's musical development, he learns to interpret the
symbols on a score as music. The music a child learns during this time of his life is
very simple melodies that involve a lot of moving. Orff believed that rhythm was the most
important part of music. This is because rhythm is what 
movement, speech, and music all have in common. Rhythm is what ties these all together to
make what Orff called elemental music. Orff uses this approach because it is believed
that children must feel and move to music before they are asked to conceptualize about
it. Speech is one of the key elements in the Orff approach not only because speech is an
inherently rhythmic action, but because Orff was the only one of the major educational
philosophers (Dalcroze, Kodaly, and Suzuki) to use speech in this way. Orff's thought was
that a transition from speech to rhythmic activities and then to song was the most
natural for a child. So, the student moves from speech to body rhythms such as clapping
or tapping, 
and then finally leads to the playing of an instrument. Orff's philosophy continues on in
this way even after a child has developed a skill for an instrument. For example,
concepts such as meter, accent, and anacrusis are introduced in speech patterns,
reinforced in other activities, and then studied in a musical context. A specific example
of this is the teaching of the concept of a canon. A simple yet varied chant or other
form of rhythmic speech is taught to the class. The students then use the idea of a round
to explore how each entrance by each different part is achieved. Finally, the teacher
notates the rhythmic pattern and shows how each part of the pattern works with the other
parts. Orff's approach to Music Education notes that speech, chant, and song are all
points along the same line. That is to say that one leads directly to the next.
Children's experiences with singing follow directly from speech. This means that melody
is actually an extension or an outgrowth of rhythm. When children begin to learn to use
their voices as musical instruments, they enter another pre-planned part of Orff's
method. There is a very 
specific order in which students learn to use solfege. As with most other theories that
involve singing, the descending minor third, sol-mi, is the first interval that is
taught. Other tones follow in succession in this 
order: la, re, do, to complete the pentatonic scale, and then finally fa and ti. The Orff
method uses the pentatonic scale because Orff believed it to be the native tonality of
children. This is cohesive with Orff's belief that music history is relived in the
development of each individual because he considered the pentatonic mode appropriate to
the development of each child. The use of the pentatonic scale also gave the students
confidence. After all, it's very difficult to improvise and sound bad when the only notes

available are those in the pentatonic scale. This kind of constant affirmation is crucial
to a child's development. The last part of Orff's elemental music is elemental movement.
As stated earlier, the word elemental in this sense refers to the kind of action, in this
case movement, in which the child participates with no prior training or instruction.
Orff said that this kind of activity made it easier for children to become expressive.
This is because children are more able to express their thoughts and feelings through
movement and painting than through words. Allowing children to express themselves in this
way allows 
them to use their imagination because, as we adults often forget, children have the most
vivid imagination. After observing these actions, the teacher then relates them in some
way to music and build musical concepts out of them. Unfortunately, many of the
activities that adults scold their children 
for are the same ones that are the most suitable for expressing feelings, such as walking
on tiptoe, hoping over imaginary obstacles, or spinning to the point of dizziness. These
are actions that adults would react to as being 'fidgety' or 'squirmy' when, in fact,
they are simply natural movements 
that children use to express themselves. The ideal Orff educator would encourage these
behaviors and use them to teach musical concepts. The end goal of the Orff method is to
develop a child's musical creativity. Where traditional Music Education dictates that a
child must learn to read music right away in order to be a self-guided and independent
musician, the Orff method focuses on the creative and expressive side of music. The
instruments that are commonly associated with the Orff method 
distinguish it from other methods. Orff uses xylophones and various metalophones that use
removable bars. This allows an educator to change bars for different modes or to remove
unnecessary bars to keep from confusing young students. The Orff instruments are modeled
after and are closely related to the Indonesian gamelans. These instruments allow great
flexibility for children who have handicaps. For example, students with visual handicaps
or hearing handicaps can hit just about anywhere on an Orff 
instrument set up to use a pentatonic scale so he can feel like he is being included. In
conclusion, the Carl Orff has been a very influential person in the field of Music
Education. He has demonstrated to us that the way to teach music to children is to let
then go back to the basics, or elements, of speech, 
movement, and singing. He has reminded us how much we really expect children to learn
music differently in the traditional method than it is natural for them to learn.