The xylophone is a musical instrument in the percussion family that consists of wooden bars struck by mallets. Each bar is an idiophone tuned to a pitch of a musical scale, whether pentatonic or heptatonic in the case of many African and Asian instruments, diatonic in many western children's instruments, or chromatic for orchestral use.
Carl Heinrich Maria Orff was a German composer and music educator, who composed the cantata Carmina Burana (1937). The concepts of his Schulwerk were influential for children's music education.
The music of Israel is a combination of Jewish and non-Jewish music traditions that have come together over the course of a century to create a distinctive musical culture. For almost 150 years, musicians have sought original stylistic elements that would define the emerging national spirit. In addition to creating an Israeli style and sound, Israel's musicians have made significant contributions to classical, jazz, pop rock and other international music genres. Since the 1970s, there has been a flowering of musical diversity, with Israeli rock, folk and jazz musicians creating and performing extensively, both locally and abroad. Many of the world's top classical musicians are Israelis or Israeli expatriates. The works of Israeli classical composers have been performed by leading orchestras worldwide.
The Orff Schulwerk, or simply the Orff Approach, is a developmental approach used in music education. It combines music, movement, drama, and speech into lessons that are similar to a child's world of play. It was developed by the German composer Carl Orff (1895–1982) and colleague Gunild Keetman during the 1920s. Orff worked until the end of his life to continue the development and spread of his teaching method.
"The Skye Boat Song" is a late 19th-century Scottish song adaptation of a Gaelic song composed c.1782 by William Ross, entitled Cuachag nan Craobh. In the original song, the composer laments to a cuckoo that his unrequited love, Lady Marion Ross, is rejecting him. The 19th century English lyrics instead evoked the journey of Prince Charles Edward Stuart from Benbecula to the Isle of Skye as he evaded capture by government soldiers after his defeat at the Battle of Culloden in 1746.
Ella Louise Jenkins was an American singer-songwriter and centenarian. Called the "First lady of children's music", she was a leading performer of folk and children's music. Her 1995 album Multicultural Children's Songs has long been the most popular Smithsonian Folkways release. She appeared on numerous children's television programs and in 2004, she received a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. According to culture writer Mark Guarino, "across her 67-year career, Jenkins firmly established the genre of children's music as a serious endeavor — not just for artists to pursue but also for the recording industry to embrace and promote."
Music education is a field of practice in which educators are trained for careers as elementary or secondary music teachers, school or music conservatory ensemble directors. Music education is also a research area in which scholars do original research on ways of teaching and learning music. Music education scholars publish their findings in peer-reviewed journals, and teach undergraduate and graduate education students at university education or music schools, who are training to become music teachers.
The German educator Gunild Keetman was the primary originator of the approach to teaching music known as Orff Schulwerk. Keetman was responsible for most of the actual teaching that was done in the early stages of the movement, perhaps most prominently as the teacher for the radio and television broadcasts that popularized the Schulwerk throughout Germany in the 1950s.
Chava Alberstein is an Israeli musician, lyricist, composer, and musical arranger. She moved to Israel in 1950 and started her music career in 1964. Alberstein has released over sixty albums in Hebrew, English, and Yiddish. She is known for her liberal activism and advocacy for human rights and Arab-Israeli unity, which has sometimes stirred controversy, such as the ban of her song "Had Gadya" by Israel State Radio in 1989. Alberstein has received numerous accolades, including the Kinor David Prize, the Itzik Manger Prize, and honorary doctorates from several universities.
Music education for young children is an educational program introducing children in a playful manner to singing, speech, music, motion and organology. It is a subarea of music education.
Dave Tarras was a Ukrainian-born American klezmer clarinetist and bandleader, who was instrumental in the Klezmer revival.
Marjorie Guthrie, who used Marjorie Mazia as her professional name, was a dancer, dance teacher, and health science activist. She was married to folk musician Woody Guthrie. Her children with him include folk musician Arlo Guthrie and Woody Guthrie Publications president Nora Guthrie.
Hanukkah music contains several songs associated with the festival of Hanukkah.
"Dona Dona", popularly known as "Donna, Donna", is a song about a calf being led to slaughter, written by Sholom Secunda and Aaron Zeitlin. Originally a Yiddish language song "Dana Dana", also known as "Dos Kelbl", it was a song used in a Yiddish play produced by Zeitlin.
Aliza Greenblatt was an American Yiddish poet. Many of her poems, which were widely published in the Yiddish press, were also set to music and recorded by composers including Abraham Ellstein, Solomon Golub, and Esther Zweig. They were also recorded by Theodore Bikel and Sidor Belarsky, among others. Greenblatt published five volumes of Yiddish poetry and an autobiography in Yiddish, Baym fentsṭer fun a lebn and her works include such well-known Yiddish songs as Fisherlid, Amar Abaye, and Du, Du.
Isabel McNeill Carley was a published writer, editor, composer and music teacher. She is considered one of the leaders of the Orff Schulwerk when it began to take hold in the United States in the 1960s. As a co-founder of the American Orff-Schulwerk Association (AOSA), Carley contributed greatly to the organization's beginnings, serving as a board member and magazine editor. Carley devoted much of her life to musical instruction, publishing a series of books titled Recorder Improvisation and Technique.
Margaret Murray MBE, was a British music educator and musician. Together with Gunild Keetman, she produced a "seminal" English-language version of Carl Orff's Orff-Schulwerk in 1957.
Paul Combs is an American jazz musician, composer, arranger, author, and educator.
Judith Rita Cohen is a Canadian ethnomusicologist, music educator, and performer. Her research interests include Judeo-Spanish (Ladino) songs; medieval and traditional music from the Balkans, Portugal, French Canada, and Yiddish; pan-European balladry; and songs from Crypto-Jewish regions in Portugal. She has received numerous research and travel grants to do fieldwork in Spain, Portugal, Morocco, Israel, Turkey, Greece, France, Belgium, Canada, and the United States, and has published many journal articles, papers, and book chapters. She plays a variety of medieval musical instruments, and sings and performs as part of her lectures and in concerts and solo recitals. She is also the editor of the Alan Lomax Spanish collection maintained by the Association for Cultural Equity.
Theodora "Teddi" Schwartz, occasionally spelled Teddy, was an American Yiddish-language singer, writer and translator. She is mainly remembered today for her singable English translation of Dona, Dona which she cowrote with Arthur Kevess.
