Composers: Salty Saint of Budapest

“For most people, music is a kind of bath to wash in,” laments the 83-year-old patriarch of Hungarian music, Zoltan Kodály. “They react with their nerves, not their minds.” With saintly dedication to the idea that good music is “the food of the soul,” Kodály has labored most of his life to make it understandable as well as enjoyable. To souls nourished on dissonant modern music, Kodály’s brand may seem like rather stale strudel. His themes remain resolutely melodic, and his rhythms never stray far from Slavic dances. Still, few 20th century composers have done more to give richness, color and genuine excitement to folk music.

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 remarked. “Now I think it is nine months before his mother’s birth. Music must be a natural part of the environment, like the air we breathe.”

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 to read com plex scores as easily as a column of figures by the time they reach the eighth grade. Best of all, says Kodály, the children become skillful performers on “a beautiful musical instrument”—the hu man voice. He believes that singing not only provides “the best foundation of musicality” but also conditions the body and stimulates the brain.

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 you.” Always at his side was his striking 27-year-old wife, Sarolta, interpreting, smoothing his way, even firmly sending him to bed at 7 p.m. to rest from a tiring day.

Before he left Stanford for an inter national conference of music educators at Interlochen, Mich., Kodály dashed off an eight-bar vocal piece on a blackboard, telling his audience that the music was theirs to keep. It was the gift he had been giving unstintingly throughout most of the century—that, and his conviction that “a life without music is incomplete and not worth living.”