Childhood immersion in the folk songs of his native Hungary and decades of painstaking musical research among his homeland’s diverse rural communities left an indelible impression on the work of Zoltán Kodály. His mature compositions, like those of his friend Béla Bartók, drew rich material from the melodies and rhythms of Hungarian music and from the equally rich vocabulary of modernist harmony. He also found inspiration in Gregorian chant and the consonant counterpoint of late-16th-century sacred polyphony, clearly present in his two choral masterworks, the 1923 oratorio Psalmus Hungaricus (with which he made his international breakthrough), the Budavári Te Deum (1936), and his exquisite Missa Brevis (1942-44). Kodály, born in 1882, was raised in the Hungarian countryside, where his lifelong love for authentic folk music took hold. He was largely self-taught as an instrumentalist and composer, enrolling at the Liszt Ferenc Academy of Music in Budapest and crowning his studies in 1906 with a doctoral thesis on the interaction between Hungarian folksong and language. He spent many summers on field trips to collect folk music, regarding it as an invaluable yet endangered national resource. Its colours and flavours permeate works such as the orchestral suite from Kodály’s stage work Háry János (1926-27), Dances of Galánta (1933), and Variations on a Hungarian Folksong (“The Peacock”) (1939), and they were central to his vast output of pieces for unaccompanied chorus. In addition to his work as composer and ethnographer, he was also a fine teacher and influential pedagogue, founding the Kodály method for teaching music in elementary and secondary schools.