Folk Music of the Hungarians
by Zoltán Kodály
Category: Folk music

In 1900, Zoltán Kodály was studying modern languages at the University of Sciences in Budapest, when the call of music eventually proved too strong. He enrolled at the Academy of Music where he developed an interest in Hungarian folk music beggining with his thesis on the strophic form of Hungarian folk songs based, in part, on the early recordings of Béla Vikár. He visited remote villages to collect songs recording them on phonograph cylinders. In 1906 he wrote the thesis on Hungarian folk song ("Strophic Construction in Hungarian Folksong"). Around this time Kodály met fellow composer Béla Bartók, whom he took under his wing and introduced him to some of the methods involved in folk song collecting. The two became lifelong friends and champions of each other's music. Kodály later founded the Institute for Folk Music Research of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. That institution has collected, transcribed, categorized, and systematized over 100,000 folk songs of the people of Hungary and of surrounding and related countries.