Carl Orff's Educational Philosophy

The Orff-Schulwerk, an educational concept for elemental education in music and movement which has been disseminated worldwide in over thirty countries, has had a significant impact on musical education for children around the world for over fifty years.

The Orff-Shulwerk involves the stimulation and encouragements of expressive, creative musical behavior within a close relationship between music, language, and movement. The Orff-Shulwerk, or OSW, involves improvisation in rhythm, melody, tonal events, structure, and musical interaction.

Specific material is to be defined through experimentation, repetition and alteration which progresses from exploration to the use of notation on a secondary level.

Call and response of improvisation, and fixed content to open up a variety of performance levels.

Movement – integration of movement, speech, singing and additional instrument playing. Allows the element to develop from another, and the combination of all in the final creative project.

A building block structure with small manageable portions of elements to reduce excessive demands and any point in time.

This philosophy seems like a very open to creative ideas version of the sequential and rote-note learning styles. While there is a common thread of a goal in mind in learning pieces of music the OSW also seems to be completely wide open to branching off into improvisational, "jam" type elements whether it be with instruments, or voice. While this creates a common path for the musician to follow it also opens up the creative juices to the project as well as making it extremely fun and not constricting to the musician at all. This concept reminds me a lot of the concepts applied to Jazz bands where their is a common theme of a song but many spots where there is jam parts, and solos. This can be extremely fun and create some very inventive projects. 

I think that the Orff-Shulwerk learning concept is extremely relevant in today's musical classrooms because it plays right into sequential learning, and Rote-Note learning, and well as the wide open encouragement to be spontaneous and creative. This is what music should be all about - learning, but very inventive, fun, and creative.

Sources: http://www.orff.de/en.html