INTRODUCTION

Following the success of last year's Summer Course, the Gabriel Marcel Cultural Association of Catania, in collaboration with OSI - Orff-Schulwerk Italiano, organizes the 2010 International Music Camp in Taormina.
The ideal perspective of OSI activities, and of the associations that feel close to the pedagogic line that it represents, is to make sure that an adequate and proportionate form of musical practice lived in the first-person enters the lives of as many children, adolescents and adults as possible, both inside and outside the school.
From this point of view, the Camp also involves teachers not directly connected to the Schulwerk area, but towards which OSI feels a strong affinity.
Orff-Schulwerk, possibly a difficult word for us, in reality responds to a pedagogic idea, simple in its essence: music is learned by making it and not abstracting it. Learning to write notes on staves does not mean ‘learning music’, but learning to codify it: meaning to begin at the end instead of at the start. First of all, music is ‘learned’ by satisfying the concrete need to experience it physically and emotionally, so that it may contribute to our global formation and growth as individuals. One ‘learns’ through a creative and collective experience that involves all that which is or can be inherent in music: gestures, movement, dance, speech, voice, musical instruments, dramatization and performance. Through all this one may ‘learn’, in other words ‘understand’, music: to understand how and why music is born, to discover its expressive and structural components and, finally, rationalize it, also through the indispensible forms of theorization and communication.

Giovanni Piazza

OSI – Orff-Schulwerk Italiano is a relatively young association (founded in 2001), based upon a teaching experience started seventeen years ago, from which came the Progetto Orff-Schulwerk organized by the ‘Scuola Popolare di Musica Donna Olimpia’. The need for a national representative body was born spontaneously from the development of that experience, that today is consolidated in a three-level training programme according to an international Orff-Schulwerk standard. After organizing the first international Orff-Schulwerk conference in Italy in 2003, OSI set the spread of the Orff-Schulwerk pedagogical line as one of its first objectives, and later founded a Forum that today includes nineteen Italian musical associations that, in total autonomy, collaborate with OSI in realizing valid seminars for the three-level training programme, and for other activities.