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• Zoltán Kodály, Teacher of Composition.

  49-65

  Tibor Tallián

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  Zoltán Kodály, Teacher of Composition. Kodály has not reached the age of 25 when in September 1907 director Ödön Mihalovich invited him to teach music theory at the Royal Academy of Music in Budapest. He was promoted to professor of composition in the higher classes in 1918. This assignment was interrupted by political events. In the autumn of 1918 Kodály was nominated deputy-director of the Academy by the revolutionary administration, and next autumn he was given leave for two years by the counterrevolution as a retortion. Only thereafter could Kodály begin the education of Hungarian composers in his school of composers which soon became legendary. In answer to an attack in a Budapest daily Kodály laid down his ars paedagogica as a teacher of composition in his article Thirteen Young Composers. In the following fifteen years as an active professor Kodály gave no statements about his teaching methods. These could later be reconstructed to some extent by the recollections of his pupils. Lately, Kodály’s exercises in counterpoint and his autograph notes in theoretical books he had studied have been published. This paper gives an overwiew of Kodály’s analyses of form and publishes several of the notes on the principles of teaching composition which he has jotted down int he early 1920s and after World War II, respectively, that is, at the beginning and at the end of his career as a teacher of composition.