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     While Carl Orff is a very seminal composer of the 20th century, his greatest success and influence has been in the field of Music
Education.

     The Orff approach, not unlike the Suzuki method, begins with the idea that music should be learned by a child the same way a language is learned. Suzuki calls this the "mother tongue approach". A child learns to speak simply by listening and then imitating and then, later in life, the child learns to interpret symbols as a written form of that language. So, then, a child should learn music in the same way.

    At an early age, a child is exposed to music and learns to sing and play percussion instruments, then, later in the child's musical development, he learns to interpret the symbols on a score as music. The music a child learns during this time of his life is very simple melodies that involve a lot of moving. Orff believed that rhythm was the most important part of music. This is because rhythm is what movement, speech, and music all have in common. Rhythm is what ties these all together to make what Orff called elemental music. Orff uses this approach because it is believed that children must feel and move to music before they are asked to conceptualize about it.

     Speech is one of the key elements in the Orff approach not only because speech is an inherently rhythmic action, but because Orff was the only one of the major educational philosophers (Dalcroze, Kodaly, and Suzuki) to use speech in this way.

    Orff's thought was that a transition from speech to rhythmic activities and then to song was the most natural for a child. So, the student moves from speech to body rhythms such as clapping or tapping, and then finally leads to the playing of an instrument. Orff's philosophy continues on in this way even after a child has developed a skill for an instrument. For example, concepts such as meter, accent, and anacrusis are introduced in speech patterns, reinforced in other activities, and then studied in a musical context. A specific example of this is the teaching of the concept of a canon. A simple yet varied chant or other form of rhythmic speech is taught to the class.

The students then use the idea of a "round" to explore how each entrance by each different part is achieved. Finally, the teacher notates the rhythmic pattern and shows how each part of the pattern works with the other parts.

    The end goal of the Orff method is to develop a child's musical
creativity. Where traditional Music Education dictates that a child must learn to read music right away in order to be a self-guided and independent musician, the Orff method focuses on the creative and expressive side of music.

     The instruments that are commonly associated with the Orff
method distinguish it from other methods. Orff uses xylophones and various metalophones that use removable bars. This allows an educator to change bars for different modes or to remove unnecessary bars to keep from confusing young students.

     In conclusion, the Carl Orff has been a very influential person
in the field of Music Education. He has demonstrated to us that the way to teach music to children is to let then go back to the basics, or elements, of speech, movement, and singing. He has reminded us how much we really expect children to learn music differently in the traditional method than it is natural for them to learn.