Word: kodding
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...dreary village of Galánta, Hungary, Composer Zoltán Kodály haunted the local railroad station, watching the come-and-go of peasants lustily singing their folk songs. "I would stand open-mouthed," he once recalled, "listening to the music die away as the train bore them off. But even then it always seemed to me that a thread of melody remained trembling in the air." For Kodály, who died last week of a heart attack at 84, those simple melodies became the wellspring of a creative life that enriched the music of Hungary...
...When Kodály entered the Budapest Conservatory as a young, sandaled Bohemian, he was appalled at the tyrannical influence of the German professors who, he snorted, "couldn't even speak Hungarian." Determined to develop "the natural mother tongue of every Hungarian composer," he teamed with another ardent nationalist, Bela Bartók, and armed with primitive Edison recording machines, roamed the Magyar countryside and collected 12,000 folk songs...
Vaulting & Cavorting. By that token, Kodály himself is a supreme product of a lifetime of singing. Though shy and frail-looking, he leads a bustling life in his Budapest apartment, and his mind remains agile enough to lace everything with a salty streak of wit. At Stanford, he vaulted on and off stages like a track star, cavorted in a swimming pool, journeyed out into the country to gaze up wonderingly at California's giant redwoods, and once drew a little girl aside with a promise of a secret, then whispered in her ear: "I love...
Revolutionary Techniques. Sixty years ago, Kodály and Fellow Hungarian Composer Bela Bartok trekked into the Magyar countryside to begin collecting folk songs, and later Kodály evoked those songs to give his compositions a simple expressiveness (best known in this country: the suite from his opera Háry Janós). Finding that many listeners still lacked the training to grasp his musical ideas, Kodály decided to improve the education of children. "I used to think the ideal age for beginning a child's musical education was nine months before birth," he once...
Last week, at Stanford University in California, Kodály wound up a week of lecturing to more than 200 U.S. music teachers and musicians who had come to learn about the revolutionary teaching techniques he has forged for 108 elementary schools in Hungary. Based chiefly on the pentatonic scale that is so prevalent in folk music (for example, the notes sounded by the five black keys on the piano), Kodály's method uses games and pictures to introduce painlessly the basic concepts of musical structure and notation. The result is that thousands of students learn...