Background
Zoltán Kodály was born in Kecskemét, where his father was a railroad stationmaster.
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.
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.
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.
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.
In December 1959, Kodály married Sarolta Péczely, his 19-year-old student at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music with whom he lived happily until his death in 1967 at the age of 84 in Budapest.