Carl orff,
The Güntherschule
. . . music education, first of all, should develop the child's ability to create or, in the musical idiom, to improvise. The child must be helped to make his own music, which grows out of his own experiences in speaking and singing, moving, dancing, and playing (p. 46).
In the early 1920s, Orff and Dorothee Günther opened a school for female musicians, dancers, and artists called the Güntherschule in Munich, Germany. The experimental school offered a space for musicians and dancers to integrate the arts through original composition and performance. With a variety of backgrounds and encouragement from their founders, students were encouraged to work together to create original compositions in music and dance. Those students specializing in dance, learned to sing and play instruments as a way to enrich their understanding of tonality. In like manner, musicians developed their particular musical abilities with supplemental studies in movement.
At the Güntherschule while working with Dorothee Günther and future colleague, Gunild Keetman (a student and later teacher at the school),
Orff experimented with improvisation and what he coined as "elemental music." What is elemental music? "He [Orff] meant an improvised music shorn of centuries of convention; a music that was magical and spiritual and pure, played on the instruments of primitive people and using movement as a fundamental component" (Frazee & Kreuter, 1987 p. 9-10). In other words, elemental music is devoid of intellectual complexities and focuses primarily on the musical elements of rhythm, melody, speech, harmony, and form.
This conceptual approach also emphasized the foundations of art: tone, movement, improvisation, text, and theater. Thresher (1964) summarizes Orff's philosophy as:
Orff postponed his own educational objectives for a time to focus on composing, but soon after, he was asked to write music specifically for children for the National Bavarian Radio broadcast. These compositions laid the foundation for his 5-volume work, Musik für Kinder (1950-54). He remained head of the Güntherschule until 1944, at which time the Germany government seized control of the school until it was destroyed by bombings during WWII a year later.
In 1928, Gunild Keetman (1904-1990) joined the school's teaching staff. This pivotal change from student-to-teacher began her legacy in the development and growth of Orff-Schulwerk (Feierabend et al., 2018). She, with her mentors Orff and Günther, was an influential and a primary originator and shaper of the Orff-Schulwerk approach. "Keetman was responsible for most of the actual teaching in the early stages of the movement, perhaps most prominently as the teacher for the radio and television broadcasts that popularized the Schulwerk throughout Germany in the 1950s" (American Orff Schulwerk Organization, n.d.). The instruments used by the students were early versions of what would come to be known as Orff instruments — barred percussion modeled after a type of African xylophone and built to Orff's specifications by his friend and harpsichord builder, Karl Maendler. These xylophones became the first seeds for his intrumentarium — what the modern-day music teacher calls "Orff instruments.”
Keetman was also a prolific composer. The Orff standard five volume Musik für Kinder contains many of her pieces. In addition, she authored several volumes of music for recorder and percussion. Much of the history and scholarship of Orff-Schulwerk before the 1990s " . . . did not give attention to Keetman's extensive contributions . . ." (Gunild Keetman Age, Hometown, Biography, n.d.), but is being remedied today through many recent publications. Keetman was mostly credited, along with Orff, for LP recordings of the Schulwerk compositions.