S2: E56 Merging Kodály and Orff Approaches

Season Two
Episode 56
Merging Kodály and Orff Approaches

Each musical approach contains main tenets and ideas about music education and what is best for our students.  Every person behind the approach had the goal of making music accessible, understandable, functional, and life-giving for the students being taught.  The more you learn about musical approaches, the more you find that similarities are greater than the differences.

I completed my Orff training in the summer of 2015 and my Kodaly training this past summer in 2019.  I’ve dabbled in some Dalcroze and general music ideas as well, but feel most confident in talking about Orff and Kodaly because I’ve spent hours immersed in learning and experiencing these approaches.  As my Kodaly training ended this summer, I began to look at my lesson plans, sequence, class structure, and overall idea of what a musical experience for students should look like as they go through their time in my classroom.  

I feel like there are strengths that can be found within Orff and Kodaly approaches so that students can experience both improvisation and composition along with notation and solfege.  Singing alongside instruments. Laban movement along with folk dances. Students can be both the movers and the instrumentalists. They can read rhythmic notation on a staff with hand signs, play it on a recorder or barred instrument, and show the rhythm using body percussion. 

As I’ve sought to merge the Kodaly lesson plan structure with the Orff creativity and elemental forms, I’ve seen students grow in their musical abilities across wider musical areas.  Here are three ideas for merging Kodaly and Orff approaches in your classroom.

1 - Structure of prepare/present/practice combined with composition and improvisation

The Kodaly sequence of learning rhythmic and melodic concepts is a concise and clear way of allowing children to experience musical elements - then naming them - then spending more time practicing and identifying where these elements can be found in other musical materials.  This structure moves through three areas: prepare-present-practice.  

The preparation phase is where students are singing songs, exploring how it sounds/feels/identifying factors, but the musical term is not named.  There is a clear ‘present’ moment where students know a lot about a musical concept, but finally they learn what it is called. Following this moment, students continue to practice other song materials related to this element.  The ‘practice’ area is a wonderful place for improvisation and composition skills to be practiced and explored. This is one way to combine approaches - using the structure of the sequence of teaching a specific concept and then allowing students to create and improvise with the concept just learned.

Another way to combine the structure and sequence with composition and improvisation is to incorporate the Orff approach throughout each stage of the sequence.  I did this recently with students in class. We were working on the ti-tika rhythm (one eighth note and two sixteenth notes). In the prepare phase, I wrote text to the piece and we spent time speaking it, clapping it, patting it.  We followed the prep phase where we figure out the notation for one phrase and found the beats where we knew what the notation would be. On the one beat where the ti-tika occurs, we showed four sixteenth notes and a tie for the first two sounds to show where the longer sound occurred.  In the present moment, I named the rhythmic symbol (eighth- two sixteenth) and then we moved to another song to practice this rhythm. The song is one that they’ve already learned that has the concept within it, but hasn’t been identified as having it yet. Then in following lessons we transferred the melody to barred instruments, added ostinatos, borduns, and other melodic supporting lines.  We could then create our own introduction, coda, and even other sections to the piece depending on where I wanted to take them and how much time we had. We can add movement for the form of the piece.

From here I can also introduce the rhythm as part of a building block and students play the rhythms on unpitched percussion or drums.  They create ostinatos out of the building blocks. We build a piece out of this based on this rhythmic element of ti-tika.

The students are able to experience the Orff process of creating and improvising and playing with the musical concept while also reading the notation, identifying it within known material and experiencing the preparation of the concept, presentation, and then practice.  

2 - Folk dances combined with Laban movements and Body Percussion

Movement is a component found in both Orff and Kodaly as well.  Carl Orff said that “elemental music is never just music. It’s bound up with movement, dance and speech and so it is a form of music in which one must participate, in which one is involved not as a listener, but as a co-performer.”  Students can experience movement and take what they have experienced and the terms they know (such as weight, swing, gallop, walk, run, lift, light) to create new movement pieces. In pieces, students can show form of a piece by using one movement during section A and switching to different movement in section B. 

You may also hear the term Laban movement.  Rudolf Laban was a movement theorist, choreographer, and dancer who categorized movement into four areas:

Direction, weight, speed, and flow.

Out of these categories come movements such as wring, press, slash, punch, glide.  Students are guided to feel how each one invokes a different sense of movement and feel within their bodies.  Students can create movement pieces to music or live instruments using these specific movements.  

Body percussion is another movement tool for students to express music.  Often body percussion and speech work well together. Transferring speech poems into clapping or patting.  Speaking it once, playing as body percussion next, and transferring to an instrument - all with the same piece.  Using simple movements of patting, snapping, clapping, stomping to create more intricate patterns, rondos, and canons is so much fun.  Some of my favorite pieces to use for this are found in volume I of Music for Children. There are pages of rhythm ideas that are begging for text to be created.  Rhythmische Ubung is another one that has lots of rhythmic ideas and body percussion pieces that are so fun to perform.

Zoltan Kodaly said that “singing connected with movements and action is a much more ancient, and, at the same time, more complex phenomenon than a simple song.  Students can experience singing with movement and actions. Play party games and singing games are wonderful for this. Folk dances provide a way for students to gain vocabulary, learn different arrangements such as longways sets and concentric circles.They can also connect with one another through playing singing games.  There are lots of variations of circle singing games, passing games, rhythmic chanting games, and chasing games.

The idea in both approaches is for students to see their bodies as an instrument of music and expression.  I love that folk dances and laban movements provide students with vocabulary and movement ideas that they can then use in improvisation movement activities and new creations within small groups in class.

3 - Singing combined with instruments

Kodaly believed that “to teach a child an instrument without first giving him preparatory training and without developing singing, reading, and dictating to the highest level along with the playing is to build upon the sand.”  

The singing voice is the most accessible of all instruments and we all have one.  Much of Kodaly’s work involves singing - solfege, melodies, folk songs, games. Singing is a part of all that is done within the work of Kodaly.  While the Orff approach is often associated with barred instruments and percussion, singing was also a part as well. In Music for Children, Orff wrote that the melodies, when possible, should be sung.  In building knowledge of specific repertoire and during the learning process before students ever play the instruments, speech and singing are the starting points for the musical piece. Much of Volume I in Music For Children includes singing pieces or text for melody lines.

In combining these approaches in a classroom setting with singing and instruments, I’ve often taken the melodies of barred pieces or recorder pieces and added text.  We would sing them in class on solfege and text before ever playing instruments. Then we would transfer the melodies to instruments and play them. Another thing to do is to accompany singing with borduns or simple ostinatos.  Students can divide into parts and one portion sing while the other plays or if students are able, they could accompany themselves while they sing.

I believe there’s a huge benefit to giving students the opportunity to process musical learning with structure and extension.  Preparing, presenting, and practicing musical concepts while allowing for improvisation and composition, moving through folk dances, experiencing laban movement terms, and body percussion, and allowing students the opportunity to sing and play instruments.  There is a wide range of what we can bring to our students and both the Kodaly and Orff approaches offer so many opportunities for us to give our students the very best.