The Racializing of Rhythm: Orff, Jazz, and Children's Music in the GDR

This paper examines the politics of GDR music pedagogy. East German teachers used Carl Orff’s “Schulwerk” to teach children an intuitive rather than an arithmetic understanding of rhythm through improvisation and movement. The method exploited a supposed affinity between children and rhythm—both belonged to the pre-conscious, “primitive” realm. More importantly, rhythmic education was to heal a citizenry ravaged by Nazism, relying on a presumed correlation between “natural” bodily movement and emotional health.

These utopian promises earned the method firm governmental support. Nonetheless, several composers complained privately that the “primitiveness” of the percussion instruments would both stunt children’s intellectual development and “rape” the music they were to play. I propose that their fears—which stood in stark contrast to the peaceful joy that Orff proponents touted—were rooted less in a Marxist critique of natural man than they were in the danger posed by another recent “primitive” music: American jazz. I show that East German understandings of both jazz and Orff’s rhythmic pedagogical system were rooted in a racialized colonial discourse that posited children and “primitives” as the predecessors to “rational” Europeans. This similarity, which had been a boon to German philosophers seeking to understand human origins in the nineteenth century, acquired a new urgency with the presence of African-American music and musicians in the twentieth. I argue that the project of shaping a “natural” citizenry through music was always shadowed by a racial project, in which German children were constantly threatened by their uncomfortable affinity to the non-European “savage.”