Hungarian Heritage 8. [antikvár]

Hungarian Heritage, Volume 8 (2007) Olga Szalay (Budapest) "What is Hungarian in music?" It took Kodály three and a half decades of research work to attempt an answer to this question, although it had been patently or latently on the minds of many thinkers since the eighteenth-nineteenth centuries. Without a thorough and extensive knowledge, however, the predecessors could only arrive at partial truths. As a musician also trained in philology, Zoltán Kodály decided to find the answer back in 1905. Equipped with a backpack and some meagre funds set aside from his tution fees, Kodály was the first professional musician to set out on foot, not shrinking back from the strains of untrodden paths. His aim was to write a history of Hungarian music on the basis of the "living library" as he called it—the centuries-old tradition preserved by simple rural Zoltán Kodály, 1910 (Eösze 1976: 47). Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály, circa 1905 (Eösze 1976: 41). For place names and regions, see the maps and the Gazetteer 11