Carl Orff : Music And The Study Of Movement

Carl Orff Carl Orff was born in Munich, Germany in 1895. He grew up in a musical household, his parents made sure of it. When he was five years old, he began taking lessons for the organ, piano, and violoncello. When he was older, he studied music at the Munich Music Academy in 1912 and became a conductor for the Munich Chamber Theater in 1916. When World War 1 began, Orff was enlisted into the Army. He was later discharged when he was buried alive in a trench. In 1924, he helped found the musical study known as Guntherschule. This combined the study of music and the study of movement. This research had a lot of influence on how music was taught to children. He began his interest in classical music in 1930 when he was visiting Italy. This interest further developed when he became the director of the Munich Bach Society. Though Orff wasn’t a Nazi sympathizer, during the Nazi regime in Germany, he cooperated with them willingly.(Kroger). Orff’s music was influenced by many things. At first he tried many contemporary influences but found it to be unappealing and so moved on to older music and literature, more specifically he focused on the seventeenth century composer Claudio Monteverdi. He used a lot of the works of Monteverdi to create many of his own songs. One such piece that was created by Orff used the poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus which recount the poet’s passion for his lover Lesbia who left Gaius for his friend. She later returned to him to get back together, but