In the summer of 1905 a young Kodály set out through the Hungarian countryside with notebooks and, soon, an Edison phonograph, transcribing folk songs from village singers before the modern world could silence them. With his friend Béla Bartók he gathered thousands, a rescue operation that changed both men's music and, in time, their nation's identity. Where Bartók drove folk material toward modernist fire, Kodály let it sing: warmly, generously, with a craftsman's polish.
The Psalmus Hungaricus of 1923 made him a national figure; the opera Háry János and the Dances of Galánta carried Hungarian village music into the world's concert halls. Just as lasting was his conviction that music belongs to everyone: the choral-based teaching approach now known worldwide as the Kodály Method begins from the idea that the voice every child owns is instrument enough.
He outlived wars, occupations and revolutions to become his country's musical conscience, dying in Budapest in 1967, by then less a composer than a national institution.
