AOSA's "Founders' Spotlight"
Jacobeth Postl
By Esther Cappon Gray*
Jacobeth Postl’s dynamic smile and twinkling eyes have led countless students, both children and adults, through enticing movement, speech and musical Orff activities. She discovered Orff Schulwerk in 1961 at a one-week workshop held by Canadian Doreen Hall at the Music Center of the North Shore in Winnetka, Illinois. Jake recalled, "It was a basic course, not a level, but an introduction to the elements of speech, singing, and instrumental playing – basic, simple materials….I was just utterly taken and so excited about it that I went to my principal." She had just been hired to teach in the Skokie District 68 before Doreen Hall's course. Her exuberant description of the Orff approach won her principal over, and together they sent an order to Studio 49 in Germany for instruments, which took six months to arrive.
Decades of active involvement in Orff Schulwerk followed after Jake immediately used the 1961 Orff workshop activities along with her undergraduate Dalcroze training for teaching the children of her new teaching position. She followed the year's teaching with studies at the renowned 1962 and 1963 Orff Schulwerk courses at the University of Toronto Royal Conservatory of Music. The Toronto courses were followed by Jake’s participation in the 1964 and 1965 summer courses at the Orff Institute in Salzburg, Austria.
Gunild Keetman, who accompanied Carl Orff on his 1962 visit to North America, was an especially influential teacher to Jake, who considered her the highlight of the 1962 Toronto course. Jake recalled, "in spite of the fact that she did not speak English, the quality, the dynamics, the personality of this woman were such that I was absolutely and totally mesmerized…. In 1962, when everything was cruising past us a mile a minute and everything still seemed so new to us (even though we had some experience with Doreen [Hall] previously), things were by no means what we would call sequenced. A great deal of the material that Keetman did was quite difficult….Most of us had very little experience with body percussion, or with memory retention through earwork! We have all developed over the years, so I’ve seen a tremendous change in what people can do! But that wasn’t true at that time. We had two left feet and four left thumbs. I think Keetman was probably taken aback with our lack of aural skills. We were so visually oriented."
In 1963 Polyxene Mathay from Greece was the special guest educator in Toronto. Jake stated, "Mathay symbolizes all the best of what Schulwerk represents to me. In addition to her fine musicianship, she was a superb teacher and she was an absolutely wonderful, approachable, sympathetic human being."
During the 1960’s, Jake Postl was involved in developing an Illinois State Gifted Program in connection with the gifted program in her school district. Jake and Lillian Yaross thrived on a flourishing teaching collaboration that led them to engage in a decades-long treasure hunt for engaging folk material which they collected using ditto and mimeograph masters and imparted to children and adults. By the late 1960’s Jake and Lillian were teaching teachers in response to the avid interest that the children’s demonstrations had evoked. Successful series’ of free Saturday morning classes were followed by implementation of a week-long Orff summer course in 1967 at Chicago’s DePaul University, followed by two-week Orff courses there for 28 years.
In 1968 Jake responded to Arnold Burkart’s invitation to the founding meeting of AOSA in Indiana, where plans were developed for a convocation, what later became known as an AOSA conference. In collaboration with Wilma Salzman, Jake drafted the AOSA constitution, and shortly thereafter she became the first treasurer of AOSA. The first AOSA conference followed in 1969. In the early days the AOSA vice president organized the year’s conference, but Jake had double duty in her 1974-75 term as AOSA’s vice president and conference chair. She recalled later, "They decided to have two conferences in the same year -- one for the east coast members and a second for the west, because they [AOSA] had become too big. It didn't work, because everyone came to both!" In 1976 Jake served as AOSA president, and besides teaching Certification Levels and workshops and regularly presenting at national conferences, she served for many years on the Orff Echo editorial committee.
From Jacobeth Postl’s perspective, the Orff Schulwerk took root, grew and blossomed during a time of committed state and national funding for gifted education and pedagogical innovation in the U.S. She commented, "I don't think the movement would have developed in the way it did if it had come over [from Germany and Austria] in today's period of conservative accountability in education. It flourished because of the time in which it was introduced. I'm grateful for the 1960s….If it survives, and I truly believe it will, it will probably take a different direction than what was originally envisioned. But that is OK. Change is as inevitable as life itself, and we must celebrate that."
*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 (1988). Orff Schulwerk in North America, 1955-1969. Ed.D. diss., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Greater Chicago AOSA (2004) An Interview with Lillian Yaross and Jacobeth Postl. Accessed October 29, 2009, URL http://www.zoominfo.com/people/Yaross_Lillian_681764643.aspx.
Yaross, Lillian, personal communication July, 2009, July 2010.
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Our mission is: to demonstrate the value of Orff Schulwerk and promote its widespread use; to support the professional development of our members; and to inspire and advocate for the creative potential of all learners.