Zoltán Kodály biography
Zoltán Kodály, Hungarian kind Kodály Zoltán, (born December 16, 1882, Kecskemét, Austria-Hungary [now in Hungary]—died March 6, 1967, Budapest), outstanding composer and authority on Hungarian folks music. He was additionally vital as an educator not solely of composers but in addition of lecturers, and, by means of his college students, he contributed closely to the unfold of music schooling in Hungary. He was a chorister in his youth at Nagyszombat, Austria-Hungary (now Trnava, Slovakia), the place he wrote his first compositions. In 1902 he studied composition in Budapest. He toured his nation in his first quest for folk-song sources within the yr earlier than his commencement from Budapest University with a thesis (1906) on the construction of Hungarian folks track. After finding out for a short while in Paris with the composer-organist Charles Widor, he turned instructor of idea and composition on the Budapest Academy of Music (1907–41).
With Béla Bartók, whom he met in 1906, he printed editions of people songs (1906–21). Their folk-song assortment shaped the idea of Corpus Musicae Popularis Hungariae (established 1951).
Kodály created a person model, Romantic in flavour and fewer percussive than that of Bartók, that was derived from Hungarian folks music, modern French music, and the spiritual music of the Italian Renaissance. His works, lots of that are broadly carried out, embrace Psalmus Hungaricus (1923), written to have a good time the fiftieth anniversary of the union of Buda and Pest; Háry János (1926), a comic book opera; two units of Hungarian dances for orchestra, Marosszék Dances (1930) and Dances of Galánta (1933); a Te Deum (1936); a concerto for orchestra (1941); Missa Brevis (1942); an opera, Cinka Panna (1948); Symphony in C Major (1961); and chamber music, together with two cello sonatas (1909–10; 1915), two string quartets (1908; 1916–17), and Serenade, for 2 violins and viola (1919–20).
Kodály’s scholarly writings embrace Die ungarische Volksmusik (1956; Folk Music of Hungary), in addition to quite a few articles for ethnographic and musical journals. The Selected Writings of Zoltán Kodály, edited by Ferenc Bónis and translated from the Hungarian by Lili Halápy and Fred Macnicol, was printed in 1974.