Zoltán Kodály

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(b Kecskemét, 16 Dec 1882; d Budapest, 6 March 1967). Hungarian composer. Brought up in the country, he knew folk music from childhood and also learnt to play the piano and string instruments, and to compose, all with little tuition. In 1900 he went to Budapest to study with Koessler at the Academy of Music, and in 1905 he began his collaboration with Bartók, collecting and transcribing folksongs. They also worked side by side as composers, and Kodály's visit in 1907 to Paris, bringing back Debussy's music, was important to them both: their first quartets were played in companion concerts in 1910, marking the emergence of 20th-century Hungarian music.

Kodály, however, preferred to accept rather than analyse folk material in his music, and his style is much less contrapuntal and smoother harmonically. His major works, notably the comic opera Háry János, the Psalmus hungaricus, the ‘Peacock’ Variations for orchestra and the Dances of Marosszék and Galánta draw on Magyar folk music (unlike Bartók, he confined himself to Hungarian material). His collecting activity also stimulated his work on musical education, convincing him of the value of choral singing as a way to musical literacy. He taught at the Budapest Academy from 1907, and after World War II his ideas became the basis of state policy, backed in part by his own large output of choral music, much of it for children, as well as other exercise pieces, and was widely used as a model abroad.

works:
Operas

• Háry János (1926)
• The Transylvanian Spinning-Room (1932)
• Czinka Panna (1948)

Orchestral music

• Summer Evening (1906)
• Háry János suite (1927)
• Dances of Marosszék (1930)
• Dances of Galánta (1933)
• Peacock Variations (1939)
• Conc. for Orch (1940)
• Sym. in C (1961)

Choral music

• Psalmus hungaricus (1923)
• Budavári Te Deum (1936)
• Missa brevis (1944)
• At the Martyr's Grave (1945)
• The Music Makers (1964)
• sacred pieces, chorus and pf / org
• many choruses, folksong settings etc for mixed, high, male and children's chorus

Chamber and instrumental music

• 2 str qts (1909, 1918)
• Sonata, vc, pf (1910)
• Duo, vn, vc (1914)
• Sonata, vc (1915)
• Capriccio, vc (1915)
• Magyar rondo, vc, pf (1917)
• Serenade, 2 vn, va (1920)
• Sonatina, vc, pf (1922)
• Wind qt (c 1960)
• pf pieces, org pieces

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Zoltán Kodály (1882-1967) was a Hungarian composer, collector of folk songs, and music educator. He developed a technique for teaching young children to read music through folk material.

Zoltán Kodály was born in Kecskemét, where his father was a railroad stationmaster. When Kodály was 18, he enrolled at both the Budapest Conservatory and University. Béla Bartók was a classmate, and the two students became interested in Hungarian folk music. This interest was part of a larger movement in Hungary at the time, the desire to discover the country's true culture, which had been under German domination for over 100 years.

Kodály and Bartók knew that what was thought to be Hungarian folk music was actually gypsy music, a kind of commercial popular music played by gypsies in cafes and theaters. About 1905 they started to collect folk songs systematically by going to rural areas and recording the music on their crude phonograph. Their fieldtrips broadened to include other central European countries, and by 1913 they had collected over 3,000 folk songs. This collection, and their transcriptions and analyses, was important in establishing the techniques of ethnomusicology, which was to become an important 20th-century discipline.

Kodály's interest in folk songs continued throughout his life, but his main activity in the period between World War I and II was composing and serving as teacher at, and later director of, the Budapest Conservatory. His first composition to achieve world fame was Psalmus Hungaricus (1923), a large choral and instrumental work, commissioned to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the joining of Buda and Pest. It is based on Hungarian melodies, but the setting is completely of the 20th century. His music has certain resemblances to Bartók's, but it is never as violent in its use of dissonance.

Another important composition by Kodály is Hary Janos (1932), a folk-based opera. He also composed an orchestral suite based on this opera, other orchestral and chamber works, and large and small choral works.

Throughout his life Kodály was interested in bringing music to the people, and he was active in reforming the way in which music was taught in Hungarian schools. He introduced a method of teaching sightsinging to young children based on folk songs, using a combination of syllables (do re mi) with hand gestures. The approach was highly successful, and the "Kodály method" became known outside Hungary after World War II and was used in some schools in England and the United States, where Kodály "workshops" were established to instruct teachers.

Kodály's last years were a series of triumphs for the octogenarian. He was treated as a national hero in his own country, and he received the highest honors when he traveled abroad, not only for his compositions but for his philosophy that music should play an important role in every child's life.

Further Reading

Percy M. Young, Zoltán Kodály: A Hungarian Musician (1964), is a sympathetic study of the life and works of the composer by an English musician who introduced Kodály's teaching ideas into England. Lászlio Eösze, Zoltán Kodály: His Life and Work (1956; trans. 1962), stresses the ethnomusicological achievements as well as the compositions and has good illustrations.

Additional Sources

Young, Percy M. (Percy Marshall), Zoltán Kodá ly: a Hungarian musician, Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1976, 1964.

Kodály, Zoltán (b Kecskemét, 16 Dec. 1882, d Budapest, 6 Mar. 1967). Hungarian composer. He wrote no ballet scores but his concert music has often been used for dance in, for example, Graham's Lamentations (New York, 1930), Limón's Missa Brevis in tempore belli (New York, 1958), and Eck's Peacock Variations (Ballet Sopianae, 1971).

• Period: Modern (1910-1949)
• Country: Hungary
• Born: December 16, 1882 in Kecskemét, Hungary
• Died: March 06, 1967 in Budapest, Hungary
• Genres: Chamber Music, Choral Music, Concerto, Opera, Orchestral Music, Symphony

Biography

Hungarian composer Zoltán Kodály is today remembered as much for his contributions to the fields of ethnomusicology and music education as he is for his own musical creations. Born in 1881, Kodály was the son of a local railway station master and amateur violinist who provided a rich musical environment for his child. Young Zoltán's early exposure to the German classics was tempered by an interest in the folk heritage of his native land; in 1900, after graduating from the Archiepiscopal Grammar School in Nagyszombat, he enrolled simultaneously at Budapest University (where he studied Germanic and Hungarian literature) and at the Budapest Academy of Music. Composition studies at the Academy were fruitful for Kodály, and he took a diploma in the subject in 1904. In 1905 he received a second diploma in music education, and in 1906 Kodály crowned his academic career with a Ph.D. earned for his thorough structural analysis of Hungarian folksong. During the preparation of this dissertation Kodály went on the first of many excursions into rural Hungary to record and transcribe authentic folk music, and in doing so built a strong and lasting friendship with Béla Bartók (who was engaged in the same practice at the time, and with whom Kodály would go on to publish several collections of Hungarian folk music).

Kodály's debut as a composer came in October 1906 with a successful performance of his orchestral poem Summer Evening (Nyári este) at the Academy of Music. Two months later Kodály left Hungary for the first time, having received funding from the Academy for a period of study in Berlin and Paris. Upon his return in 1907 he was appointed to the faculty of the Academy, eventually succeeding his teacher Koessler as professor of composition (and becoming Dohnányi's assistant when the latter was appointed director of the Academy in 1919). With the creation of the New Hungarian Music Society in 1911, Kodály firmly established himself alongside Bartók and Dohnányi as a powerful force in Hungary's developing musical culture.

Kodály produced a steady stream of music (his most famous works being the opera Háry János from 1927 and the orchestral suite from that opera) and important educational works (which have collectively become known to music educators as the Kodály method, and rank in significance alongside similar contributions by Orff and Dalcroze) until his death in 1967. In later years he made frequent concert tours during which he appeared as a conductor of his own music, though he never abandoned what he himself considered to be his primary work: the collection and systematization of Hungarian folk music and culture, and a corresponding assimilation of that body of work into a new Hungarian artistic aesthetic (a goal also shared by his friend Bartók). In the years after the Second World War he was honored by countless academic, musical, and political organizations around the globe; in 1961 he served as president of the International Folk Music Council, and, in 1964, as honorary president of the International Society of Music Educators. ~ Blair Johnston, All Music Guide