After Kodály [antikvár]

PrefaceThe reader is kindly requested not to deem the following lines of introduction as a blundering mixture of personal information and the objective discussion of educational matters. They rather contribute to shed light on my approach to the topic.Though I can look back upon several decades of teaching experience during which I was involved with amateurs and professional musicians, children of six to seven and teenagers, individual pupils and classes of thirty my attitude towards education wai injluenced from the start by the circumstance that I had not been prepared for the career of a music teacher by way of the customary teacher training. It may also have been affected by the wealth of additional experiences gained since leaving the daily routine of music education.I studied composition with János Viski, a pupil of Kodály at the Academy of Music in Budapest. In folk music I had Zoltán Kodály and in music history Bence Szabolcsi as my professors. While studying music at the Academy I also graduated at University in literature and history. After graduation I taught solfege, music literature, chamber music and piano at a music school for a decade and a half These fifteen years were not only a period of actual teaching but also of getting a profound knowledge of music and discovering it for myself. While searching for the most appropriate teaching materials in music literature for my pupils I myself was compelled to explore and study anew a great part of music literature. As a result, my teaching became imbuded with the joy of discovery I felt at acquiring a wealth of knowledge and at being able to share it with the children. I took active part in the reform of solfege teaching methods at music schools and, between 1965 and 1970, compiled for them solfege books with the accompanying teacher's manuals entitled A hangok világa (The World of Sounds), vols. I-VI.This meant the end of my involvement with music education on this level because Zoltán Kodály invited me in 1966 to work in his Folk Music Research Group. Ever since then I have had afulltime job there and at its successor, the Institute for Musicology of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, though my attachment to music education has continued in many different ways. My major fields of research include the relationship between folk music and music history, the history of Hungarian music and the monophonie music (mostly Gregorian chant) of the Middle Ages. However, I also dealt with problems of classical harmony and form for many years. At present I am head of the early music department of the Institute for Musicology; the resuh of research carried out there has been published in several books and editions of printed music since 1970. Parallel with my job there I teach folk music, history of music and Gregorian chant to students of musicology at the Academy of Music and I am in charge of the church music department. Scholarly work has not hindered me in continuing