So while there are great composers of the common practice era who have made inestimable contributions to unaccompanied choral repertoire, particularly among British and British-based composers, the number of great 20th century composers for whom the choir was the basis of their achievement is extremely small, maybe only two, and both of them writing their music in languages non-natives find it nearly impossible to sing. I've already written a bit on Veljo Tormis, who is not just a great choral composer but quite possibly #3 on my list of the greatest composer of the 20th century's second half (Shostakovich and Schnittke...). But the other is Zoltan Kodaly, better known as 'Bartok's Sidekick' or 'That guy who made the hand-signs in Close Encounters.'
A fiercely committed socialist whose every deed was toward future justice, Kodaly has become far more influential for his educational work than his music. But his music, for the most part, was didactic. Unlike Bartok, whose idea of music for the underclass was clearly very very different, Kodaly's music was a kind of proto-social realism. It was, by and large, meant to be accessible to the layman, and playable by the layman.
But two things make Kodaly's music so different from most social realism. One is that, unlike many Soviet composers, he had intimate first-hand knowledge of the music of the people - having accompanied Bartok on many trips to gather new folk melodies from rural peasants. The other is that, being a Hungarian, the whole wellspring of Hungarian culture, Hungarian language, and Hungarian arts, is practically made for Social Realism.
It's a twenty-hour drive from the Hungarian border to Estonia, but Estonia and Finland are the closest countries who share any common linguistic root to the Hungarians. Hungary was virtually cut off from all foreign influence. While next door, the Austrians evolved into high imperial culture along with the German-speaking peoples, and the Czechs evolved similarly along with Slavs around Eastern Europe who looked to Russia, Hungary stood alone; brined in a proudly pre-modern folk culture that is all the more beguiling for how it is cut off from all modern influences. What need was there in the 19th century for modern composers, novelists, artists, when their folk arts had always been more interesting than their next-door neighbors, and perhaps continued to be.
A higher Hungarian culture only arrived in the modern era, when modernity finally caught up with developments in Hungarian musical rhythm, the surreality of their folk tales, the intricacy and free use of color in their embroidery. Only then could a Bartok or a Ligeti reveal himself.
Kodaly was not a pure genius of music like Bartok who could bend the curvature of the earth to his musical vision. He was a genius of a music teacher whose passion came through in his music - perhaps more like Leonard Bernstein. But whatever the faults of either Kodaly or Bernstein, his music packs with personality wall to wall, and innovative passages, while more subtle than Bartok's blinding light, are always there. While the center of Bartok's achievement was the string ensemble, which Bartok completely remade with every conceivable folk development brought into art music, the center of Kodaly's was the more limited palatte and well-trodden path of the vocal ensemble, whose orientation he basically directed away from God toward both nationalism and people of the world - no small achievement, that. If Kodaly's music is social realism then social realism could have no better apostle.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hdeX9z-U2o. .
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