Redefining, Relocating, and Redesigning Musical Knowledge: Orff-Schulwerk Methodology in the United States

• In Event: Death, Xylophones, Rights, and Hands: On the Locations and Dislocations of Knowing

Abstract

Objectives or purposes

Music education in the 21st century is often defined by a turn toward an increased emphasis on creativity (Mark & Gary, 2007). This paper considers the design of curriculum and classroom objects as it focuses upon how this shift develops historically. To do so, the paper traces the development of an exceptionally popular music methodology, Orff-Schulwerk, in order to consider how understandings of desirable and undesirable forms of knowledge and their location(s) become produced, placing fundamental limits upon contemporary educational practices.

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework

Rather than treat curriculum as a natural, direct translation of knowledge, this paper approaches it as alchemy (Popkewitz & Gustafson, 2002). Specifically, the paper is interested in how ways of thinking developed in fields such as psychology enter the curriculum as they reassemble notions of desirable knowledge and the locations, such as designed objects, assumed to contain such knowledge.

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry

The paper engages in a history of the present (Foucault, 1978) to historicize Orff-Schulwerk as a way of understanding its contemporary forms. Further, the paper treats Orff-Schulwerk as an “event” and is interested in “rediscovering the connections, encounters, supports, blockages, plays of forces, strategies and so on which at a given moment establish what subsequently counts as being self-evident, universal and necessary” (Foucault, 1991, p. 76).

Data sources, evidence, objects, or materials

The paper constructs an archive of both contemporary and historical method books, lessons, and instrument designs. Further, it engages with prior histories of Orff-Schulwerk methodology and, in particular, the design of its lessons and instruments (Spitz, 2012; Velásquez, 1990).

Results and/or substantiated conclusions or warrants for arguments/point of view

The paper demonstrates how a post-war mistrust of human reasoning (Erikson et al., 2013) and the consequent desire for the limitation of human choice (Heyck, 2012) became embodied in Orff-Schulwerk's instrument and lesson designs. Specifically, despite desires for cultivating creativity, Orff-Schulwerk began to engineer environments which removed opportunities for choice, physically removing “wrong notes”, and placing “parameters” on musical expression in the classroom. In doing so, Orff-Schulwerk generated notions of desirable and undesirable forms of creative expression and knowledge. Further, it relocated the site of such desirable knowledges, such as understanding oneself as creative, from a historic position within the human and, instead, conceptualized it as produced through designed environments and objects such as xylophones.

Scientific or scholarly significance of the study or work

Attempting to develop creativity through designed environments and objects has come to structure much of contemporary practice. The paper shows the ways in which this structuring develops not solely through ideas about music but, instead, ideas surrounding desirable knowledges and where such knowledges are located. In doing so, the paper contributes to the history of curriculum and curriculum studies as it traces the ways notions of desirable knowledge and their locations become produced and acted upon as they place limits upon curricular thought and action.

Author

• Noah Karvelis, University of Wisconsin - Madison
  Presenting Author