This long-awaited volume of Kodály’s writings on music education contains articles, speeches and interviews by the world-renowned composer, ethnomusicologist and pedagogue...

Edited by the great Kodály scholar, Mihály Ittzés (1938–2018) and published by the Liszt Academy of Music under the auspice of Mrs. Kodály, the book exhibits different texts which originally had different purposes, some of them are longer, some consist of only one or two paragraphs, but the reader can feel the perfectly coherent aesthetic and intellectual world view behind them: the importance of singing and solmization in music education, the belief in the unquestionable value of folksongs and Western art music, the assumption that music can help us become better human beings – every page of this book is impregnated with these ideas.

Most of the writings in this volume have either never been published in English or have been difficult to access. The prefaces and postscripts for the singing exercises of Kodály form an exception: some of them might be well known to music students and professors, but reading them all together can give a more detailed picture of Kodály’s pedagogical thinking.