Program Notes

Zoltan Kodály (1882-1967)

Galanta Dances (1933)

Scored for pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets and bassoons, 4 horns, two trumpets, timpani, percussion and strings  

In 1910, fellow Hungarian composers and close friends Bela Bartok and Zoltan Kodaly, spent several years traveling the countryside armed with an early recording machine in order to record and transcribe the authentic folk music of Hungary and the surrounding Slavic countries. Both composers realized that, since Hungary had been dominated by so many different cultures throughout its history, it was in danger of losing its folk music. They traveled from town to town, discovering to their delight that the culture and traditions of the people in the small villages had remained unchanged for hundreds of years. The songs and dances that the townspeople knew by heart had been handed down through the generations and remained the same. The two composers persuaded the understandably reticent people to sing or play into the device, and in this way they collected some 3500 different songs and dances, and transcribed by hand dozens more. Their work is largely considered to be among the first truly academic studies of ethnomusicology, and it is considered that the preservation of native Hungarian music is due to their diligence.

It was during this time that Bartok and Kodaly began to envision a music that would assimilate this newfound native song. In Bartok’s own words, “it was not a question of merely taking unique melodies and then incorporating them into our works. What we had to do was divine the spirit of this unknown music, and make this spirit the basis of our works.”

With this new understanding of their native music, Bartok and Kodaly worked to infuse their work with the harmonic, rhythmic and melodic elements of what they had heard, and synthesize it with their knowledge of traditional music. It was a long process, but in the end both men succeeding in creating something really new. Later, as a respected educator, Kodaly would encourage his composition students to study folk music, and devised a method of educating children through song and dance models that introduced them to their musical traditions.

Naturally Kodaly’s music continued to be influenced by Hungarian folk elements which are apparent in his most famous works such as his opera Hary Janos, the Peacock Variations, the Concerto for Orchestra and, especially, his Dances of Galanta.

Galanta was, in fact, Kodaly’s boyhood home, and he often heard the gypsies of this town playing the same music their fathers and grandfathers before them had played. Kodaly tells us about the work in his preface to the printed score:

Galanta is a small Hungarian market town on the old railway line between Vienna and Budapest, where I spent seven years of my childhood. At that time there was a famous, but since then forgotten, gipsy orchestra, which impressed me as a child because it was my first experience of an ‘orchestral’ sound. The ancestors of every gipsy had already been famous a hundred years before. In about 1800 some volumes of Hungarian dances had appeared in Vienna among which was one ‘from several gipsies of Galanta.’ They were handing down an old folk tradition. The main motives of my work are taken from each of these volumes.

The work was commissioned in 1933 for the eightieth anniversary of the Budapest Philharmonic Orchestra, and first performed by them on October 23 of that year. The work is modeled after the traditional verbunkos, a dance in several sections, and begins with a slow introduction in the cellos which is interrupted by rushing strings. The first dance is slow, beautiful and melancholy, and returns to bridge the introduction of several new dances, each one seemingly more spirited and rhythmically robust than the last. Kodaly uses several solo instruments to introduce the new themes, flute, clarinet, oboe, in moving improvisatory passages that pay tribute to the talented musicians who made up the gypsy bands of the composer’s youth. As a last gesture, a seemingly thrilling finale is halted by a return of the improvisatory flute, oboe and clarinet, the latter of which ends by slowly fading away with several trills. The orchestra then takes this as their cue to continue where it left off and bursts back onto the scene with the rousing conclusion we were all waiting for.