- Orff, Carl
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died March 29, 1982, MunichGerman composer and music educator.He trained at the Munich Academy and held several musical posts thereafter. In the 1920s he grew interested in early Baroque music and the association of music with movement. In 1924 he cofounded a school for which he devised a comprehensive music education program (Orff Schulwerk) involving improvisation on specially designed gamelan-like percussion instruments; the program has since come into wide international use. He typically used repetitive rhythms, bare harmonies, and powerfully direct vocal parts, as in his best-known work, the secular oratorio Carmina Burana (1937), which is based on a manuscript of medieval poems.
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▪ German composerborn July 10, 1895, Munich, Ger.died March 29, 1982, MunichGerman composer known particularly for his operas and dramatic works and for his innovations in music education.Orff studied at the Munich Academy of Music and with the German composer Heinrich Kaminski and later conducted in Munich, Mannheim, and Darmstadt. His Schulwerk, a manual describing his method of conducting, was first published in 1930. Orff edited some 17th-century operas and in 1937 produced his secular oratorio Carmina Burana. Intended to be staged with dance, it was based on a manuscript of medieval poems. This work led to others inspired by Greek theatre and by medieval mystery plays, notably Catulli carmina (1943; Songs of Catullus) and Trionfo di Afrodite (1953; The Triumph of Aphrodite), which form a trilogy with Carmina Burana. His other works include an Easter cantata, Comoedia de Christi Resurrectione (1956); a nativity play, Ludus de nato infante mirificus (1960); and a trilogy of “music dramas”—Antigonae (1949), Oedipus der Tyrann (1959), and Prometheus (1966). Orff's system of music education for children, largely based on developing a sense of rhythm through group exercise and performance with percussion instruments, has been widely adopted. In 1924 in Munich he founded, with the German gymnast Dorothee Günther, the Günther School for gymnastics, dance, and music.* * *
Universalium. 2010.
