Zoltán Kodály

Born in December 1882, Kodály grew up in a Hungary where folk song still lived in daily use, not yet archived or romanticized. He collected those songs directly from villages, traveling with recording equipment and notebooks, work that fed both his compositions and his conviction that a nation's music should spring from its own soil. By mid-century he'd become as known for pedagogy as for concert works, designing a sequence that started with the voice, moved through folk melody, and built literate musicians from the ground up. The method took root in Hungarian schools, then jumped borders. He continued refining it until his death in March 1967, by which point "Kodály" meant both a man and a way of learning to hear.