Kodaly (rounding that corner)
I suffered through an interminable sales advertisement on repeated failures that the narrator had endured in searching for that “it” factor crucial to easy, fun and confident music-making.
The narrator kept on saying how ONE WORD unlocked it all. He had consulted numerous courses and online interest forums asking the question and getting myriads of techniques that only produced headaches and frustration with the immense urge just to give up. His wife in a kindly comment suggested that he lighten up and spend more time with her. Perhaps just a nicer way to say that he was never going to get the knack, never going to be a free-flowing music entertainer. Unchained from all the theory and technical stuff and self-consciousness.
But then after a hiatus, he got online from someone a single word...KODALY. This for him was the rounding of the corner toward free, natural and pleasurable music-making.
The following is an excerpt from a Wikipedia article on Kodaly:
Oops that was the tedious advertisement. I’ll try again for Wikipedia...
Throughout his adult life, Kodály was very interested in the problems of many types of music education, and he wrote a large amount of material on teaching methods as well as composing plenty of music intended for children's use. Beginning in 1935, along with his colleague Jenő Ádám (14 years his junior), he embarked on a long-term project to reform music teaching in Hungary's lower and middle schools. His work resulted in the publication of several highly influential books.
The Hungarian music education program that developed in the 1940s became the basis for the Kodály Method. Although Kodály himself did not write down a comprehensive method, he did establish a set of principles to follow in music education, and these principles were widely taken up by pedagogues (above all in Hungary, but also in many other countries) after World War II. His practices also have evolved Kodály hand signs.
In the motion picture Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a visual learning aid distributed to members of a conference of ufologists was named the Kodály Method and referenced musical notes as hand signals.
Legacy and memorials[edit]
The city of Pécs commissioned a full-length bronze statue, located in Szent István square, in his honour in 1976. According to the wishes of the sculptor, the work stands with its back to the Cathedral and facing a former playground, so that it was facing children, whose musical education was the most important thing in Kodály's life. He is depicted as a fragile old man, who walks almost imperceptibly among the horse-chestnut trees.[4]
At one point during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, the Workers Councils decide they should form the government with Kodály as president "because of his great national and international reputation."[5]
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