Gunild Keetman Gunild Keetman was a composer, musician and music teacher with a special talent for dance and the ability to combine music and movement. In 1926 she began her studies at the Güntherschule and in 1929 she joined the teaching staff of the Güntherschule as a teacher of movement technique, rhythm and music. Later, she became conductor of the school's orchestra and composer of all the music for its dance group until 1944, when the school was destroyed. In 1948, the second phase of her collaboration with Carl Orff began in the music education broadcasts of the Bavarian Radio. Towards the end of the same year, she began a series of corresponding television broadcasts, in collaboration with Godela Orff, the composer's daughter. In 1949, Eberhard Preussner, director of the Mozarteum Academy (later Mozarteum University), invited Keetman to teach children's classes. There, a new form of teaching emerged, integrating speech, music, and movement, emphasizing improvisation, and fostering expression and creativity. This was the beginning of what we now know as Orff Music and Movement Education. At the same time, Keetman conducted training seminars for adults, enabling teachers from around the world to learn about Orff-Schulwerk and introduce it to their home countries.

The radio broadcasts and lessons at Mozarteum laid the foundation for the five-volume work Musik für Kinder (Music for Children)—a categorized collection of educational material, which became known as Orff-Schulwerk. Years later, after Orff-Schulwerk had taken its final form, Werner Thomas and Hermann Regner studied Keetman’s personal musical style. Regner’s musicological analysis of her compositions recognized her music’s inseparable connection to movement and identified her distinct artistic signature as a composer.