AOSA's "Founders' Spotlight"
Joachim "Joe" Matthesius
By Esther Cappon Gray*
Thousands of AOSA members fondly remember tall, slender Joe Matthesius drawing a resonant, ringing, ritual rendition of our beloved Praetorius canon, "Viva la Musica" from the participants at annual conferences in the 1970’s and 1980’s. At such times Joe, German-born but American through and through, seemed to be the embodiment of the heart and soul of our organization. Humble and dedicated, Joe was not a music educator, but, rather, the principal of an elementary school in Ferndale, Michigan, when he discovered Carl Orff’s approach to music education. He had always been interested in music as a lay person, having studied voice, piano, guitar and recorder. He had sung in choirs and had conducted a Detroit madrigal group.
Like several other AOSA founders, Joe saw an announcement of the 1962 summer Orff workshop at the University of Toronto that brought the Schulwerk from Germany to the U.S. He registered, and the experience of working with Carl Orff, Gunild Keetman, Barbara Haselbach and Wilhem Keller that summer transformed his thinking. Demonstrations with children made it possible to picture what the approach could mean to students’ learning and social development. As Joe said, "The thing that struck me the most was the spirit of the participants and staff – the power, the feeling of the group." Through Barbara Haselbach he made the discovery that music and movement are part of the same thing, "that movement is another way to express music, that movement well done is visible music."
When Joe left Toronto he began to work with Michigan fifth graders in his school, the Best School, named for Paul Best, during lunch hours. He used the kinds of activities that he had experienced in Canada, emphasizing, as he recalled over two decades later,"rhythm, speech, body percussion, movement, and singing." In 1962, acquiring Orff instruments in the U.S. was challenging, and when Joe sent for a set of Studio 49 instruments from Germany the order was held in a U.S. customs warehouse, because the officials did not know what it was. Eventually somebody at the customs site got the idea of labeling the boxes (inaccurately) "organ parts," and sending them on to Michigan. They arrived around Easter of 1963. Joe never looked back; his protégés were ready to perform for the public by February of 1964. Not mere concerts, the demonstrations they offered were for school principals and teachers in a Detroit metro-wide group called the "Elementary School Improvement Committee." Modestly, Joe recalled that there were "favorable comments." He was pleased that some schools began Orff Schulwerk programs after they had experienced his students. Peg Van Haaren, an AOSA member instrumental in the origins of both AOSA and the Detroit Orff Chapter, recalled that parents came to Joe to ask about his music activities, and that he responded to the interest by convincing his school district to allow him to offer an Orff Schulwerk night class for interested adults. Participants in that group included Carolyn Tower, Connie Heidt, and Claire Levine, who all became engaged in AOSA and Orff Schulwerk.
After facilitating Orff activities with children for a few years, in 1965 Joe took a summer course at the Orff Institute in Salzburg. He returned to Michigan determined to do more with movement and speech activities in his Orff groups. He enjoyed sharing his students’ accomplishments; the joy was not only in the beauty of the music and movement that the children developed, but also in the warm friendship among all the members of the group. Like Orff, Joe did not try to convert uninterested teachers, because he believed that Orff Schulwerk requires a teacher who is comfortable with children’s spontaneous contributions and with improvisation, a teacher who does not try to set up every aspect of a lesson in advance. Not all teachers wish to operate in this manner. Peg Van Haaren recalled that Joe and Joan Lumsden, an elementary music teacher from Highland Park, Michigan, who had been a student in Joe’s night class, both understood that many children in the Detroit area were challenged by poverty and easily discouraged about school and life. The two responded to this by establishing for these children what they called, "The Saturday Group." The group met in Lumsden’s school every week, and then went to an established nearby camp setting for summer "Orff Camp." The Saturday Group gained recognition when it performed at the 1975 AOSA Conference in Detroit.
In 1968 when Arnold Burkart invited him to attend the first organizational meeting that led to the founding of AOSA, Joe enthusiastically joined the initiative, and served as the second national AOSA president following Arnold Burkart. According to the hardworking Orff-enthusiasts who established our organization, Joe as a non-music-educator was able to contribute the perspective of an administrator, invaluable in those early days. Joe felt that children, especially kids who are not in elementary school band or orchestra, need Schulwerk, because, "it is the only logical and really successful introduction for children into the world of music."
When Peg Van Haaren in 1969 participated in the summer course at the Salzburg Orff Institute, she found fellow Detroiter Joe Mathesius there. During a coffee break, Joe turned to her and said, "Peggy, we must try to gather people interested in Orff and share ideas." The picture in this spotlight feature shows the two, coffee in hand, in front of the Orff Institute, just after they agreed that when they returned to Michigan they would do this. They did so with great success, beginning in the subsequent fall, 1970. Five years later Detroit hosted the 1975 AOSA annual conference with Peg as conference chair; in Detroit, DOSA celebrated its 40-year anniversary during the past year.
After Joe met Carl Orff in Toronto in 1962, where, fluent in German, he did some translating for Orff, the two corresponded regularly. Carl Orff took a great interest in the activities of AOSA and would send greetings to us in the organization through letters which Joe would read aloud at AOSA conferences. Joe had family in Germany, and with his wife, Charlotte, he visited there frequently in summers. When in Germany, he would visit with Carl Orff and his wife, Liselotte. Peg Van Haaren believes that this connection between Orff and an American, who knew German, loved to correspond, and had a good sense of the kinds of stories that would illustrate the Orff Schulwerk approach with children in the U.S., had a great deal to do with Orff’s enthusiasm about the work here and the development of AOSA.
*Esther Cappon Gray teaches Literacy Studies as an associate professor in the Special Education and Literacy Studies Department of Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo, Michigan. She was one of the founders of the Kansas Orff Chapter, and served eight years on the Editorial Board of The Orff Echo. She earned her Orff Schulwerk teaching certification at Denver University, and completed a doctorate in Language Education with a minor in Music Education at Indiana University, Bloomington, IN. She currently serves on the AOSA History Committee and is writing a historical book about the development of Orff Schulwerk.
Sources:
Osterby, Patricia. Orff Schulwerk in North America, 1955-1969. Ed.D. diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1988.
Van Haaren, Margaret. Personal communications July, 2009 and June, 2010.
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