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Zoltan Kodály (1882-1967) was an eminent
musician and a native of Hungary, a "Composer, Musicologist,
and Educational Revolutionary". (G.Russell-Smith in Simpson
1976:78). He came from a family of keen amateur chamber music
players, learned the violin as a child and taught himself the
cello. He started writing church music as a result of singing
in a provincial cathedral choir and entered the Budapest Academy
as a student. He was deeply interested in authentic Hungarian
folk music and spent the decade from 1905 researching, collecting
and publishing a vast body of folk song (from 1906 in collaboration
with the composer Béla Bartók).
In 1907 Kodály accepted an appointment to
the chair of Musical Theory at the Academy of Music in Budapest.
There, he was appalled at the level of musical literacy in students
entering what was the highest music school in Hungary. He found
that they were unable to read and write music fluently and were
ignorant of their own cultural heritage. The only exposure his
students had to the vast wealth of Hungarian folk music was through
the distorted and diluted versions played by gypsies in cafés.
They had grown up in the aftermath of the Austro-Hungarian Empire
when the elite considered only German and Viennese music "good"
and German influence had dominated since the eighteenth century.
Kodály's work was based on the teaching
ideals of John Curwen (1816-80), an English educator who believed
that the study of musical symbols should be delayed until experience
of music itself had been gained. Kodály possessed a missionary
zeal which was to give back to the people of Hungary their own
musical heritage and to raise the level of musical literacy, not
only in students at the Academy but also in the whole population.
Kodály's stated point of view was that "a man without
a musical education is considered illiterate." He also
wanted to influence what people were listening to, to ensure that
it was of good quality, saying "our aim must be to turn
out children for whom music, good music, is a necessity of life".
While rehearsing the choral sections of his Psalmus
Hungaricus in 1923 Kodály had met with such inadequacies
as to convince him that something must be done to improve the
musicianship of his fellow countrymen.
"I suddenly awoke to the realization that
we have to begin from childhood."
Kodály followed Curwen's method of teaching,
which involved not introducing any form of musical notation at
first, but instead concentrated on training the beginner's ear.
Like Curwen, Kodály believed in training the "inner
ear" through singing. But unlike Curwen, good singing was
not his ultimate goal but was also a means towards further musical
training. He also believed that instrumental music making should
only begin after vocal experience had developed the child's aural
capacity:
"A child should not be given an instrument
before he can sing. The inner ear will develop only if his first
notions of tone arise from his own singing, and are not associated
with any external, visual or motor conceptions."
Kodály believed that it was very important to be able to
sight-read away from the instrument, to be able to hear the music
in one's head before an attempt was made to play it. He knew that
many professional musicians were unable to read a tune without
the aid of their instrument, saying in 1945 "It is indeed
an unsound state when many of our qualified music teachers cannot
read without the help of an instrument". Kodály
came to England in 1927 to conduct the first British performance
of his Psalmus Hungaricus at Cambridge and was surprised
and gratified by the level of competence already displayed, particularly
by the chorus, when compared with the situation that had confronted
him at the original rehearsals in Hungary. He was soon made aware
of the widely established choral tradition and the parallel tradition
of teaching sight-singing in British schools for more than half
a century, largely through Curwen's Tonic Sol-fa method. Upon
discovering this systematic method of training the inner ear,
which formed the basis of Curwen's teaching, Kodály determined
to make it the basis of a system designed to meet the special
needs of Hungarian schools.
After first experimenting with songs built entirely
on one pitch, Kodály began melodic training with the minor
3rd, which he considered to be the most natural interval for young
children to sing in tune. Curwen' hand signs and sol-fa names
are introduced as are the basic elements of rhythm. Pictures and
diagrams precede crotchets and quavers which, when introduced,
are presented in several ways to reinforce the skills already
learned.
Kodály gradually builds up the pentatonic
scale, which was selected as the basic natural scale lacking the
semitone, one of the most difficult intervals to sing. Singing
games and nursery songs are used extensively, being gradually
replaced by folk-songs more suitable for older children. During
the first four years of their primary schooling the children are
required to learn eighty songs a year.
Kodály had been involved with the collection
and analysis of Hungarian folk music since the turn of the century
and with Béla Bartók he had collected over 1000
children's songs that had formed the five volumes Corpus Musicae
Popularis Hungaricae. It was not surprising that Kodály
chose this music as the vehicle through which to teach children
as he had a great knowledge of and love for the music of the peasants
of Hungary. There were however other pedagogic reasons for his
choice. Firstly Kodály believed that as a child naturally
learns his own mother tongue before foreign languages, he should
learn his musical mother tongue, i.e. the folk music of his own
country, before other music. The historical development of music
from primitive folk song to art music should follow the development
of the child from infant to adult. Secondly, folk music consisted
of simple short forms, a basically pentatonic scale, and simple
language. These characteristics he considered would contribute
to good pedagogical use of such music with children. Thirdly,
and perhaps most importantly, he considered folk music to be a
living art that had not been contrived for pedagogical purposes.
It fitted well into a systematic scheme for teaching the concepts
and skills of music to young children. Swanwick (1985) agrees
that the Kodály Method displays a strong element
of systematic development both in ideas and teaching method.
If the step between folk music and art music was
to be bridged, there also needed to be good composed music suitable
for children to sing. In 1923 Kodály began composing works
for children's choirs and studying musical education in the schools
in depth. As mentioned earlier, Kodály was convinced that
the use of vulgar and impoverished material of the kind then popular
was actively harmful, and maintained that it was the talented
composer's duty to provide more suitable songs children to sing:
"Bad taste is infectious... bad taste
in the arts cauterises susceptibility ... We have to get rid of
the pedagogic superstition that some sort of diluted substitute
art is good enough for teaching ... Nobody should be above writing
for children: on the contrary, we should strive to become good
enough to do so". (Simpson: 81)
The majority of pieces and exercises that Kodály
began to write at this time for school use were not unison songs
but two or three-part settings because he believed that...
"If you always sing in unison, you cannot
sing in tune. You can only learn to sing in unison by singing
in two parts. The two voices correct and balance each other. The
only way to sing a series of sounds is to hear how they are related
when they sound together. (Sandor: 125)
Kodály endured a lifelong struggle with those
in the musical establishment who were content to remain with the
status quo of romantic German influence. After the October Revolution
of 1918 he was appointed Deputy Director of the Academy of Music
under Ernó Dohnányi as Director. However the new
regime fell a year later and Kodály was suspended from
duties and endured a trial to investigate his 'patriotism'. He
resumed teaching in 1921 but still experienced criticism throughout
his career. His successes on the concert platform and with his
choral revival provoked jealousy and suspicion in academic circles.
These same circles breathed a sigh of relief when he retired in
1942 after thirty-five years service but he was soon to stir them
up again with his concentrated work on education.
Like Curwen, Kodály also recognized the importance
of good teaching. Therefore one of the first steps he took in
improving musical literacy was to improve teacher training.
"It is much more important who is the
music teacher in Kisvárda than who is the director of the
opera house in Budapest... for a poor director fails once, but
a poor teacher keeps on failing for 30 years, killing the love
of music in 30 batches of children." (Kodály quoted
in Choksy: 7)
Kodály involved all those around him, fellow
professors at the Academy, colleagues in the area of folk music
collection and analysis, and his more talented pupils, in his
dream of a musically literate nation. He was also almost single-handedly
responsible for causing the required music in teacher-training
programmes to be increased to the present four-year teacher's
diploma programme in Hungary.
"Good method, devoted teacher, and responsive
children ... given the first two, can one doubt that the third
component is easiest to get?" (E.Szönyi in Choksy: x)
Kodály adopted John Curwen's sol-fa but only
as a mental keyboard for singing, and later playing from staff
notation. Curwen's hand signs were also adopted and slightly modified.
The evolution of what is now known as the "Kodály
Concept" was to occupy the composer and his disciples for
many years. Progress was impeded for a long time by the opposition
of the Horthy Government (1920-44) which supported existing Austro-Hungarian
traditions and banned the use in schools of the overtly nationalistic
folk songs and melodies on which Kodály proposed to base
the child's musical vocabulary. Through this official opposition
his first efforts at reform were necessarily limited to publishing
articles and encouraging the formation of youth choirs, the composition
of children's part-songs in increasing numbers following his first
example, Villö (The Straw Guy) in 1925, and to passing
on his ideals and theories to his pupils at the Academy, among
whom Jenö Adám, Geörgy Kerény and Benjámin
Rajeczky later published school texts of their own following Kodály's
principles.
Although that period saw limited achievement, Kodály's
general plan of educational reform remained unchanged. There were
three basic elements to his concept of initial musical training:
sung folk tunes, to provide the early musical vocabulary; moveable
sol-fa, to denote relative pitch; and the development of polyphonic
sense from the very earliest stages through simultaneous clapping
and singing, or singing in parts. As the time for his retirement
after 35 years at the Academy approached Kodály began to
devote more of his energies to producing songs and exercises for
schools.
In 1945 official resistance to Kodály's new
pattern for music teaching was finally overcome and the first
Music Primary School was founded in 1950. There are now 214 Music
Primary Schools in Hungary (Lepherd: 72) where musical standards
reach heights virtually unknown elsewhere and even the 'non-music'
primary schools have high musical standards. Despite the success
of these schools, the Kodály Method was devised
for ordinary schools with one or two lessons a week. G.Russell-Smith
speaks of the "sense of vital enjoyment and total concentration"
in all the lessons he witnessed (Simpson: 86) although Plummeridge
and Taylor (1980) comment that the "concentration on skill
acquisition could be at the expense of what might be called the
"joy" of music and that the obvious enjoyment of kindergarten
pupils was not shown by the older pupils. The Kodály concept
is organized as a teaching scheme extending from Nursery School
to Conservatoire and can therefore only be experienced where all
the institutions concerned accept a uniform syllabus. For this
reason it can only really be successful where the state has adopted
it as their "National Curriculum" as in Hungary. Wholehearted
acceptance of the Kodály method in other countries is limited
to the individual establishments that follow his methods. However,
it must be said that Kodály revolutionized his own country's
musical education and redefined for the world the standards of
excellence it was possible to achieve, the relationship of music
with the rest of education, and the importance of music in everybody's
lives. Kodály suggested that every child by the year 2000
should be able to read music.
Although Kodály's first objective was to
improve standards of musicianship at the Academy, he became motivated
by the belief that a musical education was the right of all and
came to the conclusion that a development of an acute aural sense
was the means to gain a thorough knowledge of music. Like Curwen,
he fostered musicianship and literacy through the voice with the
"movable doh" system although good singing was not
Kodály's ultimate goal. Kodály was very specific
in his use of existing folk music but also went on to compose
music specifically for pedagogic purposes. He also introduces
the staff early on in his method showing the relative positions
of the sol-fa syllables. The training of others in the delivery
of his method was also very important for Kodály.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Alexander, J. (1981) 'A tonic for music that could be the key
to success'. Guardian, November 3rd.
Choksy, L. (1974) The Kodály Method: Comprehensive
Music Education from Infant to Adult Englewood Cliffs:
Prentice Hall
Csébfalvi, E. (1995) 'Hungary' in L. Lepherd (ed) Music
Education in International Perspective. National Systems pp.65-87
Moutrie, J. (1981) 'Tonic Sol-fa in the Training of Music Teachers:
only relate, only connect' in
Plummeridge et al [lssues in Music Education]-Bedford Way
Papers 3. University of London Institute of Education.
Plummeridge, C. and Taylor, D (1980) 'Kodály in Action'.
Times Educational Supplement 28 November
Rainbow, B (1989) Music in Educational Thought and Practice
Boethius Press
G. Russell-Smith (1976) 'Zóltan Kodály
in
Simpson, K. (1976) Some Great-Music Educators London:
Novello
Sandor, F. (ed)(1969) Musical Education in Hungary
London, Boosey & Hawkes
Swanwick, K. (1985:2) 'Systems, Skills and Understanding' Bulletin
of the International Kodály Society
Taylor, D. (1982) "Zóltan Kodály-The spirit
lives on" Music Teacher, July.
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