DR.

CARL ORFF

The Orff Approach to Music Education for Children

The Orff approach is a method of teaching children about music that

engages their mind and body through a mixture of singing, dancing,
acting and the use of percussion instruments. For instance, the Orff
method often uses instruments like xylophones, metallophones, and
glockenspiels.

A key characteristic of this approach is that lessons are presented

with an element of play, which helps the children learn at their own
level of understanding. The Orff method can also be referred to
as Orff-Schulwerk, Orff approach, or "Music for Children."

What Is the Orff Method?

The Orff approach is a way of introducing and teaching children

about music on a level that they can easily comprehend.

Musical concepts are learned through singing, chanting, dance,

movement, drama and the playing of percussion instruments.
Improvisation, composition and a child's natural sense of play are
encouraged.

Who Created the Orff Approach?

This approach to music education was developed by Carl Orff, a German composer, conductor and educator whose
most famous composition is the oratorio "Carmina Burana".

It was conceived during the 1920s and 1930s while he served as music director of the Günther-Schule; a school of
music, dance, and gymnastics that he co-founded in Munich.

His ideas were based on his belief in the importance of rhythm and movement. Orff shared these ideas in a book
titled Orff-Schulwerk, which was later revised and then adapted into English as Music for Children.

Other books by Orff include Elementaria, Orff Schulwerk Today, Play, Sing, & Dance and Discovering Orff a
Curriculum for Music Teachers.

Types of Music and Instruments Used

Folk music and music composed by the children themselves are mostly used in the Orff classroom.

Xylophones (soprano, alto, bass), metallophones (soprano, alto, bass), glockenspiels (soprano and alto), castanets,
bells, maracas, triangles, cymbals (finger, crash or suspended), tambourines, timpani, gongs, bongos, steel drums
and conga drums are but some of the percussion instruments used in the Orff classroom.

Other instruments, both pitched and unpitched, that may be used include claves, cowbells, djembe, rainmakers,
sand blocks, tone blocks, vibraslap, and wood blocks.

What Does an Orff Method Lesson Look Like?

Although Orff teachers use many books as frameworks, there is no standardized Orff curriculum. Orff teachers
design their own lesson plans and adapt it to suit the size of the class and the age of the students.
For example, a teacher may choose a poem or a story to read in class. Students are then asked to participate by
choosing instruments to represent a character or a word in the story or poem.

As the teacher reads the story or poem again, students add sound effects by playing the instruments they selected.
The teacher then adds accompaniment by playing Orff instruments.

As the lesson progresses, students are asked to play Orff instruments or add other instruments. To keep the whole
class involved, others are asked to act out the story.

Orff Method Sample Lesson Format

More specifically, here is a very simple lesson plan format that may be used for young children.

First, choose a poem. Then, read the poem to the class.

Second, ask the class to recite the poem with you. Recite the poem together while keeping a steady beat by
tapping hands to knees.

Third, choose students who will play the instruments. Ask the students to play certain notes on cue words. Note
that the instruments must match the words. It is important that students maintain the correct rhythm and learn
proper mallet technique.

Fourth, add other instruments and choose students to play these instruments.

Fifth, discuss the day's lesson with the students. Ask them questions like, "was the piece easy or difficult?" Also, ask
questions to assess students' comprehension.

Finally, clean up! Put away all instruments.

Notation

In the Orff classroom, the teacher acts like a conductor who gives cues to her eager orchestra. If the teacher selects
a song, some students will be chosen as instrumentalists while the rest of the class sings along.

Parts may or may not be notated. If notated, it should be simple enough for the students to understand. The
teacher then provides students with a copy of the notes and/or creates a poster.

Key Concepts Learned in the Orff Process

Using the Orff approach, students learn about rhythm, melody, harmony, texture, form and other elements of
music. Students learn these concepts by speaking, chanting, singing, dancing, movement, acting and playing
instruments.

These learned concepts become springboards for further creative pursuits such as improvisation or composing
their own music.

Here are some quotes by Carl Orff to give you a better understanding of his philosophy:
"Experience first, then intellectualize."
"Since the beginning of time, children have not liked to study. They would much rather play, and if you have their
interests at heart, you will let them learn while they play; they will find that what they have mastered is child's
play.
"Elemental music is never just music. It's bound up with movement, dance and speech, and so it is a form of music
in which one must participate, in which one is involved not as a listener but as a co-performer."
Émile Jaques-Dalcroze

SWISS COMPOSER

Émile Jaques-Dalcroze, (born July 6, 1865, Vienna, Austria—died July 1,

1950, Geneva, Switz.), Swiss music teacher and composer who originated
the eurythmics system of musical instruction.

In his youth Jaques-Dalcroze studied composition, and by 1892 he was

professor of harmony at the Geneva Conservatory. Convinced that current
methods of training professional musicians needed reform, he revised
the teaching of harmony and developed his system of rhythmic education, in
which bodily movements are used to represent musical rhythms. About 1905
he applied eurythmics to elementary school children and later demonstrated
his controversial methods in England and on the European continent. In 1910
he founded the first school for eurythmic instruction at Hellerau, Ger., and in
1914 established a central school in Geneva, which he headed until his death.

Eurythmics was designed to deepen awareness of musical rhythms and aimed “to create by the help of rhythm a
rapid and regular current of communication between brain and body.” His pupils were taught to indicate note
values by movements of the feet and body and time values by movements of the arms. The Dalcroze method (or a
modified version of it) was frequently used to give plastic expression to fugues, symphonies, and operas.
Eurythmics also influenced the development of 20th-century dance through the contributions of such students
as Rudolf Laban, Mary Wigman, Hanya Holm, Marie Rambert, Kurt Jooss, and Uday Shankar.

Jaques-Dalcroze, who had studied with Anton Bruckner and Robert Fuchs in Vienna and with Léo Delibes in Paris,
wrote three string quartets and two violin concerti, as well as numerous pieces for the piano. His arrangements of
popular songs, children’s rounds, and chansons de geste were used for the teaching of eurythmics in schools. He
also published the Méthode Jaques-Dalcroze (5 parts, 1907–14); Eurythmics, Art and Education (1930);
and Rhythm, Music and Education (1922).

Method

Dalcroze method is like dramatization, play-party games, and dancing. While the rhythmic bodily movements in
dramatization and play-party games interpret the text of a song, in dancing. Dalcroze eurhythmic means bodily
movements which interpret aspects of the music. Play-party games and folksong dances are used as singing games.

Béla Bartók

HUNGARIAN COMPOSER

Béla Bartók, Hungarian form Bartók Béla, (born March 25, 1881,
Nagyszentmiklós, Hungary, Austria-Hungary [now Sânnicolau Mare,
Romania]—died September 26, 1945, New York, NewYork, U.S.), Hungarian
composer, pianist, ethnomusicologist, and teacher, noted for the Hungarian
flavour of his major musical works, which include orchestralworks,
string quartets, piano solos, several stage works, a cantata, and a number of
settings of folk songs for voice and piano.
Career In Hungary

Bartók spent his childhood and youth in various provincial towns, studying the piano with his mother and later with
a succession of teachers. He began to compose small dance pieces at age nine, and two years later he played in
public for the first time, including a composition of his own in his program.

Shortly after Bartók completed his studies in 1903, he and the Hungarian composer Zoltán Kodály,
who collaborated with Bartók, discovered that what they had considered Hungarian folk music and drawn upon for
their compositions was instead the music of city-dwelling Roma. A vast reservoir of authentic Hungarian peasant
music was subsequently made known by the research of the two composers. The initial collection, which led them
into the remotest corners of Hungary, was begun with the intention of revitalizing Hungarian music. Both
composers not only transcribed many folk tunes for the piano and other media but also incorporated into their
original music the melodic, rhythmic, and textural elements of peasant music. Ultimately, their own work became
suffused with the folk spirit.

His most productive years were the two decades that followed the end of World War I in 1918, when his musical
language was completely and expressively formulated. He had assimilated many disparate influences; in addition to
those already mentioned—Strauss and Debussy—there were the 19th-century Hungarian composer Franz Liszt and
the modernists Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg. Bartók arrived at a vital and varied style, rhythmically
animated, in which diatonic and chromatic elements are juxtaposed without incompatibility. Within these two
creative decades, Bartók composed two concerti for piano and orchestra and one for violin; the Cantata
Profana (1930), his only large-scale choral work; the Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta (1936) and other
orchestral works; and several important chamber scores, including the Sonata for Two Pianos and
Percussion (1937). The same period saw Bartók expanding his activities as a concert pianist, playing in most of the
countries of western Europe, the United States, and the Soviet Union.

Legacy

The significance of Béla Bartók lies in four major areas of music—composition, performance, pedagogy,
and ethnomusicology. As a composer of a stature equaled by few in the first half of the 20th century, he fused the
essence of Hungarian and related folk music with traditional music to achieve a style that was at once nationalistic
and deeply personal. As a pianist he gave concerts in Europe and the United States, disseminating the newer
Hungarian music. As a teacher he helped train generations of pianists, both Hungarian and foreign. And as an
ethnomusicologist he was one of the first to examine folk music with attention to its historical and
sociological implications. He helped to lay the foundations for the study of comparative musical folklore in Hungary
and published several important book-length studies of Hungarian and Romanian folk music. The composer’s son
Peter, a recording engineer (from 1949) who worked with Folkways Records, was a crucial figure in the
dissemination of American folk and avant-garde music on LP records.

Though Béla Bartók’s music was infrequently performed outside Hungary during his lifetime, many of his
compositions, including the string quartets and the Concerto for Orchestra, later entered the standard concert
repertory. Within a quarter century after his death, many of Bartók’s works had been recognized as belonging
among the classics of Western music.

The composer’s writings, especially on folk music, were compiled and edited by Benjamin Suchoff in Béla Bartók
Essays (1976, reissued 1993) and Béla Bartók Studies in Ethnomusicology (1997). Hundreds of Bartók’s letters and
relevant documents were collected and edited by Demény János (János Demény) in several books, most in
Hungarian. Nearly 300 of these, also edited by Demény, appear in English in Béla Bartók Letters (1971).