Tasks and activities

The Orff Center in Munich takes care of the composer's extensive artistic estate, provides for its indexing, archiving and proper storage, and ensures that it is made available to scholars and practitioners. The estate is continuously supplemented by new acquisitions. The bequests of artists associated with Carl Orff - such as the music and dance teachers Gunild Keetman and Dorothee Günther, the Orff researcher and close confidant of the composer Werner Thomas, and the musicologist Stefan Kunze - expand the archive holdings. In contrast, the Department for Elementary Music and Dance Pedagogy - Orff Institute in Salzburg, founded in 1961, focuses on the Orff Schulwerk and the pedagogical tasks associated with it.

The administrative tasks of the state institute, which is set up as an independent authority, include, in addition to the management of funds in accordance with the budgetary principles of the Free State of Bavaria, the independent administration of personnel and the care of the real estate. Maintenance of the buildings is carried out in cooperation with the Munich State Building Authority 2.

In the more than 30 years of its existence, the Orff Center Munich has distinguished itself as a research center for students, scholars, music educators and musicians, has become a contact point for theater practitioners, journalists and all those interested in the life and work of the composer Carl Orff, and has expanded the scholarly discourse through its own publications. With the multitude of its events - symposia, exhibitions, concerts, lecture evenings, film screenings - it has become a well-known and established cultural institution in Munich.

Major exhibitions such as "Carl Orff and his stage work" (Munich City Museum, 1996), "Carl Orff - Humanist against the tide of time" (Munich Gasteig, 2007) and "75 years of Carmina Burana" (Bavarian State Library, 2012) made the composer's work accessible also to interested laymen. International conferences on a wide variety of topics, such as the "Situation of Music in Germany in the Thirties and Forties" (1994), the "History of the Günther School" (1998), the millennium event "Present in the Future: Composers' Institutes and their Mission" (2000), on "Gunild Keetman - Pedagogue and Composer" (2004), on the "Music Theater of Carl Orff" (2007) and on "Carl Orff's First Stage Work Gisei - The Sacrifice" (2010) collect and focus the musicological and theatrical examination of the life and work of the composer and his artistic companions and had an impact far beyond Bavaria's borders.

The work of the next few years will be devoted to in-depth research specifically on the biography of Carl Orff. In a large-scale project, the entire estate will be digitally indexed (for the first time) after it has already been sorted and catalogued, and will initially be digitized internally for protection. The technical set-up of the institute's own digitization area was based on advice and support from the Digitization Center of the Bavarian State Library. The indexing of metadata by and about Carl Orff in the archives of the Bayerischer Rundfunk can be continued in cooperation with the BR in the course of the next months. In addition, communicating Carl Orff's work in events and keeping it alive remains an important pillar of the work of the Orff Center Munich.