Born: Dec 16, 1882 in Kecskemet, Hungary
Dead: Mar 6, 1967 in Budapest, Hungary
Genre: Orchestral Music, Chamber Music, Choral Music, Vocal Music
Country: Hungary

Hungarian composer Zoltan Kodaly is today remembered as much for his contributions to the fields of ethnomusicology and music education as he is for his own musical creations. Born in 1881, Kodaly was the son of a local railway station master and amateur violinist who provided a rich musical environment for his child. Young Zoltan's early exposure to the German classics was tempered by an interest in the folk heritage of his native land; in 1900, after graduating from the Archiepiscopal Grammar School in Nagyszombat, he enrolled simultaneously at Budapest University (where he studied Germanic and Hungarian literature) and at the Budapest Academy of Music. Composition studies at the Academy were fruitful for Kodaly, and he took a diploma in the subject in 1904. In 1905 he received a second diploma in music education, and in 1906 Kodaly crowned his academic career with a Ph.D. earned for his thorough structural analysis of Hungarian folksong. During the preparation of this dissertation Kodaly went on the first of many excursions into rural Hungary to record and transcribe authentic folk music, and in doing so built a strong and lasting friendship with Bela Bartok (who was engaged in the same practice at the time, and with whom Kodaly would go on to publish several collections of Hungarian folk music).

Kodaly's debut as a composer came in October of 1906 with a successful performance of his orchestral poem Summer Evening (Nyari este) at the Academy of Music. Two months later Kodaly left Hungary for the first time, having received funding from the Academy for a period of study in Berlin and Paris. Upon his return in 1907 he was appointed to the faculty of the Academy, eventually succeeding his teacher Koessler as professor of composition (and becoming Dohnanyi's assistant when the latter was appointed director of the Academy in 1919). With the creation of the New Hungarian Music Society in 1911, Kodaly firmly established himself alongside Bartok and Dohnanyi as a powerful force in Hungary's developing musical culture.

Kodaly produced a steady stream of music (his most famous works being the opera Hary Janos from 1927 and the orchestral suite from that opera) and important educational works (which have collectively become known to music educators as the Kodaly method, and rank in significance alongside similar contributions by Orff and Dalcroze) until his death in 1967. In later years he made frequent concert tours during which he appeared as a conductor of his own music, though he never abandoned what he himself considered to be his primary work: the collection and systematization of Hungarian folk music and culture, and a corresponding assimilation of that body of work into a new Hungarian artistic aesthetic (a goal also shared by his friend Bartok). In the years after the Second World War he was honored by countless academic, musical, and political organizations around the globe; in 1961 he served as president of the International Folk Music Council, and, in 1964, as honorary president of the International Society of Music Educators.

- Blair Johnston (All Music Guide)