Zoltan Kodaly
Along with his lifelong friend Bartok, Kodaly was responsible for giving Hungarian music a new impetus in the early years of the twentieth century, drawing on the rich and complex folk traditions of the country. Regular field trips to remote country regions resulted in a huge number of wax cylinder recordings and carefully notated versions of folk songs, which he painstakingly studied and classified over many years (the collection eventually contained more than 100,000 items). Kodaly was appointed professor at the Franz Liszt Academy in 1907 and continued to work there for most of his life. His international breakthrough came with the premiere of the choral piece Psalmus hungaricus in 1923, and the opera Hary Janos three years later. At the same time, he began to revolutionise music education in Hungary, developing a new way of teaching children based on group singing. Remaining in Hungary through many changes of government, the rest of his life revolved around these three strands of work, which influenced and enriched each other. Dances of Marosszek (1930) and Dances of Galanta (1933) showcased the folk music of those regions in the form of colourful orchestral suites.
Web site of the International Kodaly Society https://www.iks.hu/
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Our age of mechanization leads along a road ending with man himself as a machine; only the spirit of singing can save us from this fateKodaly, 1966