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Gladys had retrained as a primary teacher around fifteen years prior to this interview. She had grown up with music, playing the organ for chapel as a high- school student and described herself as ‘having sung and played the piano all my life’. She was also adept at picking up new instruments, such as guitar, ukulele and recorder. During her teacher training she majored in dance and drama,

believing at the time that, ‘I don’t need to do any extra study in music, because as soon as I get into the classroom I’ll just be able to do that.’ Gladys reported being perplexed by the fact that despite having actively sought practicum experiences in

classrooms where music was a strength, she was never directed towards a placement in which music featured in the classroom programme.

Upon graduation Gladys took a job as a Year 7 teacher in a full (Years 7 to 8) primary school and was delighted to discover she had a colleague, a recent

graduate with a Bachelor in Music Education, who encouraged her involvement in the school music programme. Gladys was somewhat surprised when her young colleague said, ‘Oh, you’re better (at teaching music) than most of the students I went through university with!’ This feedback ‘empowered’ Gladys and led to her attend a workshop which introduced her to the Orff approach with dramatic effect:

The moment, the very instant I did that fantastic workshop I knew: ‘Great, I can be a music teacher because this is what I want to do and I just did every Orff workshop from that point on.

Gladys recalled a focus on rhyme and rhythm at these afternoon workshops; she ‘just loved’ everything she did to do with rhythm, the spoken word, speech ostinati, body percussion and untuned percussion. Finding it personally enjoyable and exciting, she immediately saw an application to her classroom context:

I felt I had come home….I thought, ‘It’s great. I can do this in the classroom. I don’t need any special equipment. I don’t have to be the music specialist to ‘do’ music. I can just get on and do it!

Although she did not consciously think, ‘I would like to be a music specialist,’ the workshop experience changed her professional direction. She now wanted to ‘develop all the music education’ she could at the school at which she was employed. She was able to immediately apply what she had learnt in workshops to her classroom context, and also assist with the choir and orchestra. As a result of the positive impact that Gladys’s work in music was having in the school, she was given a grant of $5000 to purchase instruments (tuned and untuned

percussion) and a room was designated as a music space. Shortly afterwards Gladys was given the role of teaching music to a number of classes one day a week.

When Gladys applied for a job at an intermediate school where she would be responsible for the music programme, she was aware of her excitement at the prospect of ‘spending the rest of my professional life developing my Orff

appointed. Although Gladys’s previous experience made her comfortable with the year and age level of the students, she found the first year of the new job an enormous challenge, because she discovered that the students had ‘hated coming to music’. This did not deter her, however: ‘I knew I had it in me to win them over.’ One of the first things she did was to establish class performances on a marimba ensemble at the weekly school assembly, confident that these

performances would change attitudes to music: ‘As soon as anyone has heard a marimba group, they just want to do it!’ The students became happy to come to class and there was new enthusiasm for performance opportunities such as talent quests and other performance events, with everybody ‘wanting to have a go’. Gladys received positive feedback from the principal and her colleagues, who suggested that the vibrant music programme was part of what contributed to a ‘nice atmosphere’ in the school. Although teachers at intermediate school do not generally ‘see a lot of parents’, she found that parents of students who were ‘musically inclined’ (those who learned an instrument outside of school) were keen to share with her their appreciation of the music programme, acknowledging the value of the ‘fun ensemble experiences’ it offered: ‘Although they see I am not giving their champion violin child extra lessons or extending her in that way, they do see that they join in with the ensemble and have so much fun.’ Gladys took planning seriously and spent a lot of time preparing her classes. The Orff approach underpinned the work she did with the recorder and tuned percussion ensemble. She also taught ukulele, where the students ‘play chords and sing because it’s fun and the students like it’. In her role as music teacher, she needed also to take account of needs for more formal performance events based around traditional choral repertoire, which she also very much enjoyed. Sometimes there was a flow-over from her classroom work, when students asked for favourite pieces of a more informal nature to be included in a performance repertoire. The Orff approach matched the needs of Gladys’ professional life and she

continued to pursue her involvement in Orff workshops when possible. She found the ‘immersion’ in music ‘joyous’ and the ongoing learning process ‘exciting’. As well as motivating her to be a music educator in a school, the Orff experience had reawakened and confirmed in her the sense of identity as a musician: ‘It just

made me realise, “I am a musician.”’ She recalled that as a teenager she had particularly loved to play Bach – ‘all those interweaving, four-part contrapuntal strands’. When a somewhat ‘dry’ teacher of music had suggested to her that she needed to learn the ‘rules of harmony’, Gladys, who recalls her experience of harmony up to that point as being strongly visceral, found the suggestion repellent and it put her ‘right off studying formal theory’. She contrasted this with recent successful practical experiences of improvisation over a ground bass in an

advanced Orff workshop, which in her opinion taught the rules without sacrificing the visceral aspects of this knowledge. As for her experience of music-making in Orff workshops, she commented: ‘It just gets easier and easier the higher up you go.’ Further alluding to the importance of the visceral nature of the musical experience, Gladys reported that one of the most ‘musically inclined students’ who had gone on to secondary school had, on returning to the music room for a visit outside of class time, felt the freedom to roll on the floor chanting: ‘I love this room. I love this room!’

4.8.2 Gladys’s perception of the principles and processes of the Orff