Zoltán Kodály’s love for Hungarian folk music began in his childhood as he heard peasants singing in and around the small towns where he grew up. In his own words, “I always remembered whatever I heard somewhere. I could memorize rather complicated songs by ear back then.” He gradually learned that in comparison to popular and serious composed music, “peasant music is entirely something else, with which I became acquainted from servants, schoolmates, and country people.”

While at college, he “wanted to write the entire history of Hungarian folk music” until he looked through the already printed collections and “saw that it was impossible – most were either badly written down or false. I had already gotten together a small folksong collection in my head from childhood on, and when I compared these songs with their printed versions, I then saw that they did not match.

Kodály realized how taking on the dual roles of composer and scientist would help him make the voice of his people heard. “It resulted in a new, necessary field of work for me—these songs must be collected afresh and correctly written down. That was the scientist’s task, but at the same time, quite an inevitable necessity for the composer, who without knowing the song of his people, really can’t develop it any further. The new collections brought forth many songs that were previously completely unknown.”

In 1905, the one-year-older Béla Bartók discovered Kodály’s first published collection and sought him out, resulting in their lifelong collaboration that grew into the Institute for Folk Music Research of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, which even today continues their research and publishing of tens of thousands of Hungarian folk tunes and those of neighboring and related cultures.

This richness of musical material is not only the foundation for the Kodály Concept of Music Education, it also provides a model to emulate for composers, musicologists, and teaching musicians around the globe. Kodály and Bartók referred to their common work as comparative musicology, a pioneering and uniquely Hungarian form of ethnomusicology.

Kodály the composer-scientist was so highly regarded that he was eventually elected as President of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and later as President of the International Folk Music Council (now the International Council for Traditional Music).

(Written by Jerry L. Jaccard, with Kodály quotations compiled from his English translation of Zoltán Kodály, Mein Weg zur Musik–Fünf Gespräche mit Lutz Besch, My Path to Music–Five Conversations with Lutz Besch. (Zürich, Peter Schifferli Verlags AG «Die Arche», 1966).