Word: kod
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...sheer parallelism I will criticize "Gladiator" on a film-appreciation level: The cinematography is childish. For example, after two KOd bodies are strewn across the ring, the camera, emulating tactics delineated in the World Wrestling Federation hand-book, pans down on them from above. Audience laughter undoubtedly follows this most unsubtle ploy...
Instead, BartÓk looked to his own Eastern Europe for inspiration and found it in folk music. In 1905 he and fellow Composer Zoltán Kodály began their pioneering work in ethnomusicology, traveling the back roads of Hungary armed only with an Edison phonograph and insatiable curiosity. They discovered the authentic tunes of the Magyars, largely based on modal orpentatonic (five-note) scales and sung to jagged, irregular rhythms, rather than the gypsy melodies used by Liszt, Brahms and even BartÓk in such early works as the Op. 1 Rhapsody that had previously passed...
...Language. By melding the sprightly vigor and natural speech rhythms of the folk melodies with traditional harmonies, Kodály and Bartók forged a new, distinctly Hungarian musical language. The works of Bartók, always the more inventive and adventuresome, became increasingly dissonant and experimental. Kodály's music was more a paean to peasant simplicity-edges blunted, the passion sometimes prettified, but always stimulating in its warmth, clarity and soaring lyricism...
...Kodály, darkly warning of the dangers of experimentation, never strayed from his roots, disdained writing for "the well-trained and elite" in favor of reaching "the simple man who can understand by direct feeling without learning music." A steady but not prolific composer, he excelled more at vocal than orchestral music, and pieces like the suite from his bright, good-humored opera Háry János became concert-hall staples. His life's output was remarkable for its uniform excellence; his unabashedly melodic First Symphony, for example, written when he was 79, evokes the same...
...after the death of his first wife, who was 18 years his senior, he married a comely blonde music student, Sarolta, who was 56 years his junior. She acted as intermediary and hostess for Kodály who, as the dean of European composers and Hungary's most revered citizen, received an endless stream of visitors in his Budapest apartment during his last years. A shy, slight, spade-bearded man with the face of an El Greco apostle, he admonished people to "go to the peasants. Hear them sing. You can't learn from musical scores only...