Zoltn Kodly

b.16 December 1882, Kecskemet

d.6 March 1967, Budapest

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Along with Bla Bartk, Zoltn Kodly is one of the two major figures in Hungarian music in the twentieth
century. Composer, pioneering ethnomusicologist, groundbreaking educationalist and critic, Kodly enjoyed a
status in his native land that is perhaps unrivalled by any other figure anywhere else in the world.
Kodly was born in Kecskemt, in Hungary, on 16 December 1882. Though from a musical family, his initial
inclination was towards literary studies. As his father was a railway official, the Kodly family had a rather
peripatetic existence: from 1884 until 1891 they lived in Galnta (later to be immortalised in the orchestral
dances Kodly based on folk music from the area), then moving to Nagyszombat, where Zoltn studied violin
and piano and sang in the cathedral choir an early introduction to the importance of choral singing. He
explored the scores in the cathedral music library, and taught himself the cello to make up the numbers for his
fathers domestic quartet-evenings. And he was already composing: in 1897 the school orchestra played an
overture of his, to be followed by a Mass for chorus and orchestra a year later.
His higher education began at the University of Sciences in Budapest in 1900, but the call of music proved too
strong and in 1902 he enrolled at the Academy of Music, taking a Ph.D. in 1906 with a thesis entitled "Strophic
Construction in Hungarian Folk Song". He was now composing prolifically and he had already begun his
fieldtrips, collecting folksongs in the Hungarian countryside with his close friend Bla Bartk; though they
published their first joint collection early on, it was not until 1951 that their comprehensive critical edition of
Hungarian folksongs appeared.
As with Bartk, Kodlys own music was coloured by the joint influence of Hungarian folksong and of Debussy
and French impressionism (he spent some months in Paris, where he attended Widors lectures). On his return
to Budapest in 1907 he was appointed teacher of theory at the Academy of Music, and a year later he began to
teach composition. He was to teach there for the rest of his life: upon his retirement as a professor, he was
brought back as the Director of the Academy in 1945.
His compositions began to make headway outside Hungary around 1910, stimulated by concerts in which
Bartk and Kodly presented their own music. The real breakthrough came in 1923, with a commission to
celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the union of the two cities of Buda and Pest. The result was the Psalmus
Hungaricus, a powerful setting of a sixteenth-century Hungarian version of Psalm LV which established Kodly
as both a national cultural leader and a figure of international standing. The first of the two operas which
followed, Hry Janos (1926) and The Spinning Room (1932), yielded a suite that soon became internationally
popular, as did the orchestral Dances from Marossek (1930) and Dances from Galnta (1933), all presenting
an authentic Hungarian national idiom in a manner that allowed it international prominence. His other orchestral
works include a Concerto for Orchestra (193940) a Symphony (195761) and, one of his best-known scores,
the Variations on a Hungarian Folk Song (193839), often referred to as the Peacock Variations. Among his

choral-orchestral output the Missa Brevis(194244) enjoys considerable esteem, as does the Budavr Te
Deum (1936).
Kodlys authority as a musical pedagogue is almost as high as his reputation as a composer. The Kodly
method he developed exploits the natural musicality of children to open the pleasures of performance to them,
and has become a commonplace of music teaching all around the world. He composed an enormous quantity
of choral exercises explicitly intended to encourage amateur singers to extend their techniques, so that his
music is likely to remain an active part of the worlds musical life as long as people still want to sing.
Zoltan Kodaly is published by Boosey & Hawkes

This biography can be reproduced free of charge in concert programmes with the following credit: Reprinted by
kind permission of Boosey & Hawkes