Early years Gunild Keetman was born in Germany in 1904 to parents who seriously cultivated music and made sure it was an integral part of their daughter’s life. Her parents also expected her to get a full education, which included study at the university level. Despite the turbulent times of World War I and the unfortunate restraints placed upon women, she went to the
University of Bonn in 1923. She then transferred to the
University of Berlin the following year, but that did not work out well either. After struggling for a few years, she finally made what would become a pivotal decision in her life: she enrolled in the Güntherschule in
Munich in 1926. Carl Orff and Dorothee Günther opened this school in 1924 in Munich to protest the German version of Victorianism then rampant. The Güntherschule employed modern dance to provoke a protest, combining rejection, discovery, and idealism. It was here that Keetman finally found where she belonged and what she wanted to do with her life. She became fully invested in the school. In fact, she would spend the next 18 years of her life learning, and then eventually teaching at the school.
Teaching In 1945, when Keetman was 41, the Güntherschule was destroyed in an
Allied air raid. Keetman and the other members of the school were lost. For years, this establishment had been all they had known, and it was now gone. Keetman stated, “We had our recorders with us; we could not do anything but make music together. In that moment, we played out our entire misery and sadness. I believe that when we finally stopped playing, we had played ourselves a little courage.” It was a result of this event, however, that Keetman turned her writing focus to a significantly younger audience. She began a struggle for educational reform, as she took the ideas and methods of the Güntherschule and applied them to music and movement education for younger children. Administrators were not keen on educational reform during this time, so Keetman had the idea of broadcasting her methods by the radio, and later, television. After successfully broadcasting over radio, television, and records, the approach was becoming a success. In 1950, Keetman and Orff wrote the five
Music for Children volumes, enabling the approach to reach an international audience. It was also during this decade that Keetman turned her focus to training teachers at the Orff Schulwerk headquarters in Salzburg. The work had become the essence of her life; she lived and breathed it every moment. She would continue to teach others to teach in this way until her death in 1990. ==Compositional style==