This book is the result of the inspiration and collaboration of many friends of the music of Gunild . They encouraged a collection which would highlight especially accessible examples of her for classroom use while urging you to be aware that more than 20 volumes of her rich musical await your exploration.

Without Corey Field there would have been no book. He challenged me to hunt for the golden buried in the gray Schott volumes; and sure enough, they glimmered.

American Orff colleagues long familiar with Keetman's music enthusiastically embraced the project. McCreary provided a personal index to the entire Schott Keetman catalog, with such explicit as "teachers need the entire book." She is a national living treasure of knowledge of, and for, Keetman's work.

Steve Calantropio, JoElla Hug, Rick Layton, Arvida Steen, Carolee Stewart and Judith Thomas graciously provided lists of their Keetman favorites for children and adult students. These teachers are promoters and caretakers of Keetman's art from their personal experiences of the power of her legacy.

Barbara Haselbach and Mimi Samuelson from the Orff lnstitut have provided invaluable help in matters. And when I was lost in the Black Forest of scholarly German, my St. Thomas Christiane Harrassowitz provided the bread crumbs I needed.

Finally, I wish to acknowledge Keetman biographer, project supporter and dear husband Kent Kreuter. He has provided the fertile soil as well as the necessary nutrients to bring the Keetman garden into bloom.

This working edition of Gunild Keetman's music is intended to give you easy access to the variety of remarkable artistic expressions which she created from simple means. Keetman was an artist and a teacher; both qualities are evident in every piece in this collection.

The small forms in which she worked encourage the development of musical competence and sensitivity of your young performers. Keetman was well aware that ensemble work strengthens rhythmic security and invites improvisation from musicians all ability levels.

Keetman authored more than twenty books of pieces for recorder, mallet and percussion instruments to supplement the five volumes of Music for Children. This collection presents only rhythmic exercises and pieces for xylophones from five books published from 1965 to 1970 by Schott Musik International, Mainz.

Rhythmische Übung [Rhythmic Exercises] - Edition 6359 (1970)
Erstes Spiel am Xylophon [First Instruction on the Xylophone] - Edition 5582 (1969)
Spielbuch für Xylophon [pieces for Xylophone]
Volume 1: Edition 5576 (1965)
Volume 2: Edition 5577 (1966)
Volume 3: Edition 5578 (1966)

Absent from this collection, but essential to the Orff teacher, is music for recorders (Schott editions 3557A and 3557B) and with hand drum (Schott editions 3625 and 6587). These are full of stimulating challenges and rich rewards for you your students.

If you are a newcomer to Orff Schulwerk you will find many points for beginning your work. Seasoned practitioners also find challenges for their older students and possibilities to rediscover and present known pieces in new ways.

This is not a volume for teaching mallet technique, nor is it offered as a sequential approach to the mastery of Orff Schulwerk. Yet, the material is ordered in a general progression from very simple to more complicated following the organization of the five volumes of Keetman literature under consideration. These volumes are full of musical gems; selection was made primarily the basis of accessibility for classroom performance.

It's best to open this book with a xylophone at hand in order to try all the parts and to experiment with alternative mallet technique, tone color and form possibilities to those suggested here. For these pieces are not static entities; rather, they are alive to the variety of realizations which inevitably evolve from artistic teachers in collaboration with their eager classes.

We are fortunate that in recent years the many musical accomplishments of Gunild Keetman have begun to receive the attention they deserve. Unfortunately, there is yet no full study of her life. In the meantime, the following brief assessment may provide some insight into a complex woman who lived in extraordinary times.

Born in Germany in 1904, Keetman's musical environment was rich with possibilities. Her parents were great music lovers and provided her with a solid musical education. A family quartet performed regularly and frequent concert attendance was the norm.

Keetman's parents also had high academic expectations for their daughter even including a university education. At that time such an attainment for a woman would have been remarkable under even the best of circumstances. It was even more so when we remember that Germany in the early 1920s was close to unravelling from the intense economic pressures following the disaster of the Great War. But despite these obstacles, Keetman did go off to the University of Bonn in 1923 only to drop out and transfer the following year to Berlin. Apparently the curriculum and general orientation of these two institutions were not to her liking for she spent only a semester at each. We can only imagine the family's response to her decision to withdraw not once but twice. Despite these setbacks she continued to search for a more appropriate musical education.

It was then, in 1926 at the age of twenty-two, that she made what was almost certainly the key decision of her life; she enrolled in the school newly created by Carl Orff and Dorothee Günther in Munich. The Güntherschule, as it was called, had been established in 1924, near the end of what Karl Toepfer calls "the strangest, most expressive, and most experimental period of German modern dance". Günther and Orff wanted to both synthesize some of those experimental approaches and move beyond them with their own. In doing so they made the Güntherschule part of the powerful revolt against the German version of Victorianism. This protest had begun at the end of the nineteenth century and would continue through the rest of the Weimar years. What made this uprising so engaging, compelling - and frightening - was its combination of rejection, discovery and idealism. Modern dance, with its emphasis on human passions and inner experience, especially embodied this protest; that is why it appealed so deeply to expressionist artists like Kirchner and Nolde and why they and others so often made dance the subject of their work.

In this challenging environment Keetman at last found a home, one that was probably beyond her wildest dreams. Specifically, there was the stimulation of new approaches to music and dance which heightened their integration to the point that musicians and dancers were interchangeable; even the instruments, often of new design, became part of the choreography. And then there were the new colleagues. Günther was a particularly valuable associate for she had years of teaching experience in a variety of modern dance and movement pedagogies. There was also the extraordinary Maja Lex, an electrifying dancer whose broad impact was probably exceeded only by Mary Wigman.

Keetman, in a classic example of being at the right place at the right time, flourished in this very new world. In only four years, by the age of just twenty-six, she had moved from university drop-out to composer, author, teacher and international performer. In all of these areas she was doing important, well-received work. In 1930, for instance, when Günther founded the Tanzgruppe Günther, Keetman composed all the music for Lex's choreography. They enjoyed instant success and were flooded with offers to tour. This brilliant beginning culminated six years later at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. There her dance compositions were performed by thousands of children before an international audience to the warmest applause.

Perhaps it was these successes and others like them that led Keetman to remain in Germany in the late 1930s. The fact that her work was deeply rooted in Munich and in her associations with fellow German colleagues (who also remained) must have played an important role as well. But whatever the explanation, Keetman's decision to stay eventually had significant consequences for her musical career.

Keetman had, throughout her twenties and early thirties, been able to avoid the tensions swirling about Europe in the interwar years. In fact, her multifaceted career had no doubt flourished beyond her wildest expectations. But now, in the late 1930s and especially in the early 1940s, she began to experience the disasters that many had already undergone and which now awaited Germany. The culmination came in 1945 when the Güntherschule in Munich was obliterated in an Allied air-raid. She was forty and the one major institution with which she had been associated for almost her entire adult life lay in ruins. She responded to that disaster by going with a colleague to see if anything could be salvaged only to discover that the situation was utterly hopeless. Some years later she described her reaction to a friend: "We had our recorders with us; we could not do anything but make music together. In that moment, we played out our entire misery and sadness. I believe that when we finally stopped playing, we had played ourselves a little courage."

Keetman used that courage to inaugurate her second musical career, one that would last for over forty years almost to the year of her death in 1990 at the age of eighty-six. Initially, in the 1920s and 1930s, Keetman composed for and performed almost entirely with adults. Her concertizing abroad to, for instance, the United States and France, also used adult materials for adult audiences. Her teaching as well was for the most part centered on older students. Now, in the aftermath of World War II, the focus of her teaching and composing shifted entirely to much younger students.

Beginning in 1948 Keetman began to overcome the three obstacles that confront any new approach to education. To begin with, people - especially teachers and administrators - must be informed. Her 1948 broadcasts over Bavarian radio began in a small way to do just that. In the years that followed she saw to it that teachers and administrators the world over would come to know of the approaches she and Orff had developed. In 1962, for instance, she went abroad to instruct others in the new techniques. Through film, records and television she did much not only to tell, but also to show, the effectiveness and artistry of the Schulwerk approach.

Second, any new method will need new materials and these Keetman also began to provide in 1948 when she and Orff wrote and composed "The Christmas Story," their stage piece in Bavarian dialect to be sung and acted by Bavarian children. A much more important example of new materials was the publication in 1950-1954 of the five volume edition of "Music for Children." As the years passed she reached out to an international audience, seeing to it that teachers in many countries had materials appropriate to the abilities of their students. Keetman continued providing such literature throughout her life. In fact, it is these compositions that are very likely to be remembered as her single most important contribution to the success of Orff-Keetman musical instruction.

Keetman also made an important contribution to overcoming the third obstacle to the broad success of any new educational approach: the teaching of teachers. Beginning in the 1950s she herself began that process. By the end of the decade she was this abroad and, in 1961, in the new home of the Orff Schulwerk in Salzburg she inaugurated the international summer courses. So began the steady stream of teachers to Austria determined to experience at first hand her teaching insights. There is no better testimony to her great skill in this work than the ease with which one can find teachers who credit her with a profound effect upon their lives.

The central aim of Gunild Keetman's second musical life was to be educationally useful. Through her demonstrations, instructions and compositions she stands as the very embodiment of such usefulness. The tens of thousands of students and teachers who have either directly or indirectly been touched by her work would readily agree. This collection is an attempt to offer a small sample of the many volumes of material she provided as musical models for music educators throughout the world, and it is offered as a personal tribute to her important contribution to us all.

This Schott publication of Jane Frazee's has been around since 1998 but few of us Aussies have ever seen it. What a pity!

The book is subtitled "Rhythmic Exercises and Pieces for Xylophone by Gunild Keetman". As most of you are aware I'm sure, Keetman was the co-author of the five volumes of Music for Children (commonly called "The Brown Books") but she rarely gets the recognition she deserves for the enormous input she had in developing Orff-Schulwerk. In her own right, Keetman authored more than twenty books of pieces for recorder, mallet and percussion instruments to supplement the five volumes. This book by Frazee represents a collection of these pieces published originally between 1965 and 1970. In her introduction, Frazee says "These volumes are full of musical gems; selection was made primarily on the basis of accessibility for classroom performance".

The collection represented here is obviously similar in style to those pieces in the Brown Books and can be adapted to suit a variety of teaching situations and styles. What Jane Frazee has done (yippee!) has added specific teaching techniques including how to teach body percussion patterns, left/right mallet use, speech rhymes to aid the learning of rhythms and how to teach a piece by breaking it up into short playable sections. The pieces are generally graded in difficulty (and they get quite tricky) and are all in C pentatonic but with varying tonal centres.

I highly recommend this book for those who LOVE the pieces in the brown books. If you under utilise these, you may find that "Discovering Keetman" with it's how-to-teach-it format, very user-friendly.

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