Tribute To Zoltan Kodaly (1967)

Abstract A great man has gone from us. Not only a great musician but a great human being, and a very contemporary one. By that I do not mean necessarily a fashionable contemporary composer-Kodaly was beyond & above that. But he was a man who was able to make sense of contemporary life. He was there. He did not avoid problems. He remained and triumphed.And out of the problems he produced solutions which have changed our way of thinking. He made sense. He lived a long life, but to the end, kept his vitality, & his faculties. In Budapest when we saw him, late in the Autumn of last year, he was as lively as I have ever seen him. He talked animatedly about musical education, Ansermet’s recent provocative essays on science & music, the Winterreise, the reaction of the present day, urban, young to folksong. He was awareness itself about the problems of contemporary art. It is difficult to realise that he is no longer among us. But what a legacy he has left. Superb choral works, the Psalmus Hungaricus, stage works which still hold the stage, Hary Janos, & excellent chamber music, and, what I perhaps personally cherish the most-a volume of two hundred pages-folk-songs, collected by him & Bartok, arranged for childrens voices. They are of an originality, simplicity yet richness, which is startling. We can all learn from these, from their beauty of sound, freshness, their multum in parvo. One is reminded of his famous words ‘nobody is too great to write for children; in fact he should try to become great enough for it.’ Not only did he leave these endless miniature masterpieces for children, but he worked for & re-planned their musical education-new methods of sight reading & vocal training, new curricula. One result of his educational efforts is that at this moment over 80 of the state schools in Hungary (& I do not mean the musical schools) have one hour’s general music period every day. And with excellent young [young] men & women to teach the youngsters-I have seen some of them at work.