Bartók and Kodály

Hungarian Music

Course 1 · Chapter 4 · Bartók & Kodály

Two composers born a year apart changed what Hungarian music meant. Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály went into the villages with a phonograph, recorded what they found, and showed that the real folk song of Hungary was quite different from the Roma-band style that Liszt and Brahms had made famous. They then turned that material into some of the most important music of the twentieth century, and Kodály's ideas about teaching singing spread across the world. This chapter follows the collecting, the composing and the teaching. Names and dates are from general knowledge and flagged "check".

Two Careers

Béla Bartók

Born in 1881 in Nagyszentmiklós, then in Hungary and now in Romania; a pianist, composer and scholar who taught at the Budapest academy (check). He left Hungary in 1940 for the United States and died in New York in 1945, in poor health and poorer circumstances than his reputation suggests (check).

Zoltán Kodály

Born in 1882 in Kecskemét; composer, folk-song researcher and educator, who remained in Hungary through the war and into the communist period, dying in 1967 (check). He was a leading public figure in Hungarian music for decades.

The partnership

They met around 1905 and began collecting together, publishing a joint volume of folk songs in 1906 (check). Their friendship and collaboration were close in the early years and less so later.

Collecting with the Phonograph

  • The method. Using wax-cylinder phonographs, Bartók and Kodály recorded singers and players in villages across the Kingdom of Hungary, writing down the tunes later and cataloguing them by type (check the equipment and the dates).
  • The scale. Bartók eventually collected thousands of melodies, not only Hungarian but also Slovak, Romanian and later Turkish and others (check the figures). He treated them as scholarly material, publishing long studies.
  • The discovery. They found that the old peasant songs were different in scale, rhythm and form from the verbunkos and csárdás (Chapter 2), and that the "Hungarian" music of the cafés was a later, urban style.
  • Neighbours. Bartók recorded the music of Slovak and Romanian villagers as carefully as Hungarian, and he found influences moving in all directions (check). He argued against narrow national claims about folk music, and this brought him trouble with nationalists (check).

Bartók's Music

Work (check each)Note
Six String Quartets (1908 to 1939)Widely regarded as among the most important quartet cycles of the century; they draw on folk rhythms and sound without quoting tunes simply.
Duke Bluebeard's Castle (1911)A one-act opera, with a libretto by Béla Balázs, which was slow to find an audience.
Mikrokosmos (1926 to 1939)153 graded piano pieces for teaching, from beginner level upward.
Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta (1936)A concert work known for its structure and sound.
Concerto for Orchestra (1943)Written in the United States for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, and one of his most popular works.
More than quoting tunes Bartók did arrange folk tunes directly in many works, but in his major compositions he absorbed the rhythm, the modes and the structure of the folk music into a modern style, rather than quoting. The claim that he "copied folk tunes" mixes up his arrangements with his original works (check, see the myth in Chapter 1).

Kodály's Music and Method

  • Choral music. Kodály wrote a large body of choral music, from unaccompanied choruses on folk and poetic texts to the Psalmus Hungaricus (1923), written for the fiftieth anniversary of the union of Buda, Pest and Óbuda (check).
  • Other works. The opera Háry János (1926), with the well-known suite, and the Dances of Galánta (1933) (check).
  • The method. From the 1930s Kodály argued that children should learn music through singing, beginning with folk songs of their own culture, using movable-do solfège and hand signs. Many of these elements were developed by his colleagues and by earlier traditions (check how much came from him).
  • Spread. Music teaching based on his ideas was adopted in Hungarian schools and in many other countries, and there are Kodály institutes abroad (check).
A British comparison Cecil Sharp and Ralph Vaughan Williams collected English folk songs at about the same time, and the songs entered school singing books and later English concert music (check the dates). The Hungarian case is notable for the scale of the field research and for how closely it was tied to a national system of music education.
Check the details Dates, places of birth, counts of recordings and works, and the origins of parts of the Kodály method are from general knowledge. Several are debated by scholars, and the question of how Bartók's reputation changed after his death is also complicated. Verify against biographies and the Bartók archives.

Exercises

Exercise 1

Explain what Bartók and Kodály discovered by collecting folk songs and how it changed the idea of "Hungarian music".

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Exercise 2

Choose one work by Bartók and one by Kodály and say how each used folk music: by arrangement, by absorbing its features, or both.

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Exercise 3

Describe the core ideas of the Kodály method and give one reason it spread internationally and one point on which scholars would want more evidence.

→ Solution

Quick Reference

  • Bartók: born 1881; collecting from about 1905; quartets, Mikrokosmos, Concerto for Orchestra; died 1945 (check)
  • Kodály: born 1882; Psalmus Hungaricus, Háry János; the Kodály method; died 1967 (check)
  • The discovery: old peasant song differs from the café "Hungarian" style
  • The method: teaching through singing, folk songs first (check)
  • The caution: Bartók absorbed folk music; he did not simply copy it