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Zoltán Kodály | |
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 Kodály in the 1930s | |
| Born | (1882-12-16)16 December 1882 |
| Died | 6 March 1967(1967-03-06) (aged 84) |
| Education | Ferenc Liszt Academy of Music |
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| Known for | Kodály Method |
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Zoltán Kodály (UK:/ˈkoʊdaɪ/,US:/koʊˈdaɪ/;[1][2]Hungarian:Kodály Zoltán,pronounced[ˈkodaːjˈzoltaːn]; 16 December 1882 – 6 March 1967) was a Hungarian composer,ethnomusicologist,music pedagogue,linguist, andphilosopher. He is well known internationally as the creator of theKodály method of music education.
Born inKecskemét, Kingdom of Hungary, Austria-Hungary, Kodály learned to play theviolin as a child. In 1900, he entered the Department of Languages at the University of Budapest and at the same time Hans von Kössler's composition class at the Royal Hungarian Academy of Music. After completing his studies, he studied in Paris withCharles-Marie Widor for a year.[3]
In 1905 he visited remote villages to collect songs, recording them onphonograph cylinders. In 1906 he wrote a thesis on Hungarian folk song, "Strophic Construction in Hungarian Folksong". At around this time Kodály met fellow composer and compatriotBéla Bartók, whom he took under his wing and introduced to some of the methods involved in folk song collecting. The two became lifelong friends and champions of each other's music.
Kodály's works show great originality of form and content, a blend of highly sophisticated mastery of the western European style of music,[citation needed] including classical, late-romantic, impressionistic and modernist traditions, and on the other hand a profound knowledge and respect for the folk music of Hungary (including the Hungarian-inhabited areas of modern-daySlovakia andRomania, as those territories were part ofHungary). Partly because of theGreat War and subsequent major geopolitical changes in the region, and partly because of a naturally rather diffident temperament in youth, Kodály had no major public success until 1923. This was the year when one of his best-known pieces,Psalmus Hungaricus, was given its first performance at a concert to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the union ofBuda andPest (Bartók'sDance Suite premiered on the same occasion.)
Kodály's first wife wasEmma Gruber (née Schlesinger, later Sándor), the dedicatee ofErnő Dohnányi's Waltz for piano with four hands, Op. 3, andVariations and Fugue on a theme by E.G., Op. 4 (1897).[4] Emma died in November 1958, after 48 years of marriage.
Thirteen months later, in December 1959, Kodály marriedSarolta Péczely [hu], his 19-year-old student at theFranz Liszt Academy of Music with whom he lived happily until his death in 1967 at the age of 84 inBudapest.[5]
In 1966, Kodály toured the United States and gave a special lecture atStanford University, where some of his music was performed in his presence.[6]
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Throughout his adult life, Kodály was very interested in the problems of many types of music education, and he wrote a large amount of material on teaching methods as well as composing plenty of music intended for children's use. Beginning in 1935, along with his colleagueJenő Ádám (14 years his junior), he embarked on a long-term project to reform music teaching in Hungary's lower and middle schools. His work resulted in the publication of several highly influential books.
The goals of the Kodály method can summarized into the following points:[7]
The Hungarian music education program that developed in the 1940s became the basis for theKodály Method. Although Kodály himself did not write down a comprehensive method, he did establish a set of principles to follow in music education, and these principles were widely taken up by pedagogues (above all in Hungary, but also in many other countries) afterWorld War II. His practices also have evolvedKodály hand signs.
In the motion pictureClose Encounters of the Third Kind, a visual learning aid distributed to members of a conference ofufologists was named the Kodály Method and referenced musical notes as hand signals.
The city ofPécs commissioned a life-sized bronze statue, located in Szent István square, in his honour in 1976. The sculptor, Imre Varga, positioned the statue so that its back is to theCathedral and it faces a former children's playground, reflecting the central importance to Kodály of musical education for children. He is depicted as an aged man, walking among horse-chestnut trees.[8]
In 2016, another life-size bronze statue of sitting Kodály by the same sculptor Imre Varga was installed in the northern part of the Buda Castle park. 47.5052182N, 19.0319091E
At one point during theHungarian Revolution of 1956, the Workers Councils proposed to form a government with Kodály as president "because of his great national and international reputation."[9]
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