Zoltan Kodaly (1882-1967)

Quotation

I would advise my young colleagues, the composers of symphonies, to drop in sometimes at the kindergarten, too. It is there that it is decided whether there will be anybody to understand their works in twenty years' time.

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Biographical

Zoltan Kodaly was born at Kecskemet on 16 December 1882, and died Budapest, 6 March 1967. 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 Bartok, collecting and transcribing folksongs. They also worked side by side as composers, and Kodaly'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. Kodaly, 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 Hary Janos, the Psalmus Hungaricus, the Peacock Variations for orchestra and the Dances of Marosszek and Galanta draw on Magyar folk music (unlike Bartok, 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. [Adapted from Karadar]

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