Zoltán Kodály (UK: , US: ; Hungarian: Kodály Zoltán, pronounced [ˈkodaːj ˈzoltaːn]; 16 December 1882 – 6 March 1967) was a Hungarian composer, ethnomusicologist, music pedagogue, linguist, and philosopher. He is well known internationally as the creator of the Kodály method of music education.
Born in Kecskemét, Kingdom of Hungary, Austria-Hungary, Kodály learned to play the violin 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 with Charles-Marie Widor for a year.
In 1905, he visited remote villages to collect songs, recording them on phonograph 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 compatriot Béla 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.
In 1919, Kodály was appointed alongside Béla Bartók to the Music Directory by the People's Commissariat for Education and Culture in the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic.
Kodály's works are a blend of the western European style of music, including classical, late-romantic, impressionistic and modernist traditions, and the folk music of Hungary (including the Hungarian-inhabited areas of modern-day Slovakia and Romania, as those territories were part of Hungary). Partly because of the Great 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 of Buda and Pest (Bartók's Dance Suite premiered on the same occasion.)
Kodály's first wife was Emma Gruber (née Schlesinger, later Sándor), the dedicatee of Ernő Dohnányi's Waltz for piano with four hands, Op. 3, and Variations and Fugue on a theme by E.G., Op. 4 (1897). Emma died in November 1958, after 48 years of marriage.
Thirteen months later, 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.
In 1966, Kodály toured the United States and gave a special lecture at Stanford University, where some of his music was performed in his presence.
Beginning in 1935, along with his colleague Jenő Ádám, Kodaly worked on a project to reform music teaching in Hungary's schools, and published several books.
Kodály's music education philosophy can be summarized as:
Music teaching should be sequential and begin with the child in mind.
Children should be taught music from an early age.
The sequence should be logical and follow the same process children learn language.
Music classes should be enjoyable and engaging.
Singing is the first and most valuable tool for learning musical concepts.
Teachers should pull from quality folk song materials in the "mother tongue" of the students.
The Hungarian music education program that developed in the 1940s became the basis for the Kodály philosophy. 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 music teachers (above all in Hungary, but also in many other countries) after World War II.
The city of Pécs 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 the Cathedral 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.