Re: Carl Orff

[Ted Kuster <ted...>]

The music program at my daughter's elementary school relies heavily on these 
xylophone-like things that are called Orff instruments because Orff himself 
developed them as educational tools. I'm strictly a lay person in this context, 
not an expert on Orff or music pedagogy or anything, but I admit it made me a 
little uncomfortable at first to be playing around with these toys named after 
a Nazi. When I saw how brilliantly the instruments are designed to connect with 
children's imaginations, and how beautiful they are in themselves (even I, a 
mere bass player, can get a pretty nice sound out of them), and that the name 
attached to them means nothing to the kids, I gave myself permission to 
provisionally put aside the question of why Orff did what he did and just enjoy 
the kids and the music. I don't say this is morally unquestionable, I'm just 
describing a small real-world wrinkle in the moral fabric. I guess it's a case 
by case thing.

Ted
www.ReadThisToMe.com

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----- Original message ---------------------------------------->
From: Jordan Hirsch <trombaedu (at) earthlink(dot)net>
To: World music from a Jewish slant <jewish-music (at) shamash(dot)org>
Received: Wed, 26 Feb 2003 14:07:32 -0500
Subject: Re: Carl Orff

>on 2/26/03 12:36 PM, Sylvie Braitman at curlySylvie (at) hotmail(dot)com wrote:

>> Of course he was not the only one, and he was dead. Carl Orff is a
>> complicated case since one of his grandparent was Jewish. He managed to hide
>> that quite well and save his "ass" brilliantly.
>> I would not say his music is Nazi. I think that at the same time some
>> composers of Jewish origins were writing similar things...
>> Other complex cases are Richard Strauss whose son's Jewish family ended up
>> in Theresienstadt, despite of the fact that he had been the first president
>> of the Reich Music Chamber.
>> Then we can go on to Karajan and his brilliant post war career, Furtwangler
>> and Elizabeth Scwartzkopf, all brilliant musicians who joined the Nazi party
>> ( not Furtwanger, I believe) for professional as well as political reasons.
>> Sylvie
>There are spome additional problems with discussing Strauss. By the time of
>the war, it is possible that Strauss was suffering from some kind of
>senility. It is hard to determine in the later years of his life just how
>much he understood of the Nazi program.

>Jordan

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