Isabel McNeill Carley was a published composer, writer, editor and lifelong innovator and creative teacher of music. She grew up in Chicago and Toronto. The first American Honors graduate of the Orff Institute in Salzburg, Austria, she was a founding member of the American Orff-Schulwerk Association. She established and edited for its first fifteen years AOSA's journal, The Orff Echo, and organized and instructed at Orff certification programs in the US and abroad. She composed works for piano, instrumental and vocal ensembles, performed in chamber-music consorts, and taught music for over fifty years to children and adults. Carley's three-book Recorder Improvisation and Technique series is a classic, integrating recorder instruction with musicianship, improvisation and the Orff Approach. It is used successfully in Orff certification courses as well as classrooms.
