The phrase "Kodály school" was first used by Mátyás Seiber in a November 1926 article on Kodály as a teacher of composition: "Anyone trained in the 'Kodály school' can count himself lucky."¹ (The inverted commas indicate that the phrase was unusual.) What Seiber was referring to was not an artistic orientation but an institutional form directed by a particular individual. The expression cropped up again, about a year and a half later, in István Sonkoly's review of Jenô Ádám's Suite for orchestra: "[Ádám's] composition displays all the virtues of the Kodály school. He writes concisely, favouring classical form, his orchestration is not overly dense, and he tends to treat the woodwind soloistically."² Again, "Kodály school" stands not for an orientation or trend, but for all that Ádám had absorbed in his studies under Kodály.
During the 1920s and 1930s, the expression "Kodály school" is rarely used in the literature on music and exclusively in the context of education, as a reference to the totality of a composer's academic work. This was the usage that prevailed for years, with Sonkoly employing it in this sense even in 1948: "Kodály, the composer and teacher, has founded a school"³ is a clear allusion to the students as a group, yet Sonkoly was concerned with how Kodály taught the craft of composition and not with the factors that united this group. As late as 1972, Bence Szabolcsi saw the feature most characterizing the Kodály school as the love of the craft of composition.⁴
Infrequently though it was used, the "Kodály school" did acquire a new meaning in the late 1940s. Writing on the works of Ferenc Szabó, Endre Szervánszky, Ferenc Farkas and Sándor Veress in the Bartók issue of the music journal Zenei szemle, Szabolcsi recognized the "echo and reflection" of Bartók's and Kodály's music in works by the younger generation.⁵ For him, what distinguished the school of Bartók and Kodály was its professionalism, artistic independence and a musical idiom that drew on both European and Hungarian traditions. However, Szabolcsi also emphasized the differences between the great role models and their heirs, stressing the importance of the new embedded messages that were in accord with a new social and political environment.

The school of Bartók and Kodály did not seek to make things uniform and characterless, but rather to set the composers free and to help them become complete artists. It is quite natural that the voice of the older masters keeps surfacing in the works of the present generation, but it is just as obvious that this echo and reflection conveys an entirely different meaning today, appearing in different forms, serving different messages and offering different solutions.
What these artists have in common is, first and foremost, their high level of professionalism, which imposes the strictest demands and requires commitment and dedication from creators and audiences alike. Furthermore, they share a musical idiom that is Hungarian in a European way. This is their natural home, their working material, their way of thinking, of which they have taken possession and which they have claimed as the focal point from where they watch the world revolve. Of course, the stability they feel beneath their feet does not mean they can afford to spare any effort; the motions of the world certainly present them

with some very difficult questions.⁶

Although Szabolcsi linked the concept of "school" to the names of both Bartók and Kodály, it was not only because of the Bartók commemorations of 1948. A few months earlier, a conference of composers and critics in Prague, the aim of which was to create a unified ideological platform for the countries of the Soviet bloc, had produced a resolution⁷ that stated that one possible response to the crisis in musical composition would be for composers to establish strong ties to their own national traditions, since internationalism was not possible in music.
Hungary's position was special: it was Kodály who had claimed the espousal of national traditions for new Hungarian music early in the century-and thus the following generations could feel confident about being on the right path. This is why Szabolcsi invoked the great role models. At the same time, his article contains a number of hidden allusions. He respects the framework provided by the resolution- witness the references to "different messages", a Hungarian idiom or questions posed by a world in motion. On the other hand, his formulations reveal his pride in the Kodály school. Indeed, he comes close to implicitly criticizing the resolution when he contrasts the call for uniformity with a characteristic of the Bartók-Kodály school, which is its individuality, and when he stresses the Europeanness of the Hungarian musical idiom.
András Mihály and Endre Székely, two prominent exponents of the new "politically correct" musical policies of the day, tried to distance themselves from the Hungarian tradition of the 1930s and 1940s, while salvaging from it whatever they thought could still be useful.⁸ Total rejection was out of the question, since both Bartók and Kodály were unassailable and rejecting them would have been tantamount to blasphemy. Kodály's special status (reinforced by his physical presence) is seen in an article by Mihály. Here Mihály avoids any attack on Kodály through the lame excuse that Kodály's oeuvre is not completed and therefore not open to criticism-unlike Bartók's, from which the works that may serve as examples for the younger generation can now be selected.⁹
In effect, modern Hungarian music as a tradition had been manipulated and appropriated by the Communist regime, and this inevitably brought on a crisis in Hungarian musical life at the time of the new opening following the 1956 cataclysm. Theorists, critics and composers alike seemed to wish to make amends for the guilt they felt at having betrayed the school. Once more, they were trying to deal with the past without rejecting it in its entirety- in this they were in line with the demagogy and responses prevailing in the Kádár era. While criticizing "excesses," they constantly invoked the Kodály tradition and the Kodály school. Given that the school had its origins in the 1930s, they were able to absolve themselves of any guilt. But alongside this self-criticism and self-absolution, they had something new to deal with: after 1956, the gates had been flung open to the new music of the West. Reviews of new premieres began to appear in the most important forums for contemporary music, such as the new journal Magyar Zene, founded in 1960. They posed the question of how to create a modern musical language incorporating the new Western trends while remaining true to the Hungarian tradition; how can music be both modern and specifically Hungarian?

The idea that the pupils of the two leading figures in Hungarian music should form a group was already current in the early 1920s, even if the name "Kodály school" had not been coined. Aladár Tóth, an important music critic with strong ties to the Kodály circle, wrote as early as 1922: "The preservation and cultivation of the Bartók-Kodály tradition is one of the most important tasks of our musical life."¹⁶ And in December 1923, reporting on a concert devoted to Kodály's works, he offered an idealized Romantic portrait of the revolutionary creator surrounded by a group of devoted disciples:

We are at the workshop where Hungarian culture is being produced. Here are the greatest performers, serving the greatest genius. The hall is filled with all those of importance on the serious arts scene and an enthusiastic throng of disciples. It is an image fit for biographies, illustrating how the artist's extreme loneliness can be alleviated.¹⁷

However, when Tóth was committing this cliché to paper, Kodály could hardly have been surrounded by an enthusiastic throng of disciples. He had just begun to teach at the Academy again, after an enforced leave of absence, due to his part in the 1919 Hungarian Soviet Republic. His very first class, which was to become famous later on, may have only been studying the fundamentals of counterpoint at this moment; they were far from being a "school", in the sense of sharing the same aesthetic values and creating their own works to express those values.
In the early 1920s, the "school" consisted of three Kodály apologists- Szabolcsi, Tóth and Antal Molnár. After the resounding success of Psalmus Hungaricus in 1923, however, Kodály's position changed overnight. His great reputation and the way his music united modernity with national traditions were decisive inducements for the young generation to study with him. It is significant, however, that Aladár Tóth was talking about the tradition of new Hungarian music at a time when that tradition meant only two names, Bartók and Kodály-who had been prominent for only a dozen or so years themselves. Clearly, Tóth was pursuing a fantasy: he wished Bartók and Kodály would represent more than a brief, passing efflorescence in the history of Hungarian music, and was hoping for a first golden age of a national music that would endure for many years to come. It is almost as if the significance of the music of Bartók and Kodály, indeed its very raison d'etre, had hinged on whether or not they would have successors. No wonder Tóth had been anticipating a new generation long before they would have appeared on the scene.¹⁸
As for Szabolcsi, he showed little concern for successors at the time. He made no reference to Kodály's students until as late as 1934¹⁹ and his first mention of a Kodály student by name-Lajos Bárdos-did not come until 1937.²⁰ As a scholar of early music history, he obviously couldn't react to newly composed music in the same way as his friend the music critic Tóth could. However, there have been other reasons for his silence on the subject. For Szabolcsi, Hungarian national classicism in music was already a reality thanks to Kodály, and no disciples, indeed not even Bartók, could compete with the perfection Kodály had achieved. Even in a late article Szabolcsi emphasized what he called the master's "universal Hungarianness"; that quality, he claimed, set him apart from everyone else.

At the beginning of the century, the thought and the possibility [of a universal Hungarianness] had just been born; by mid-century, it entered a period of crisis. By that time, Kodály was alone in proclaiming and representing it; he was lonely even among his disciples and followers. It seemed as though he had been the last, at least for a long time, to possess this quality; most artists of the time preserve a few fragments, at most, of the previous totality. Yet the Whole does not reside in the parts; even the sum of all the parts is not identical with it.²¹

Antal Molnár, the musicologist and aesthetician, took a different approach from Aladár Tóth. Molnár's writing on new music had a certain "messianic expectancy".²² He was waiting for the arrival of a new classicism imbued with the collectivist spirit of a new society. Bartók and Kodály, Molnár wrote in 1927, were

the first harbingers of a new artistic era, who of course are still only experimenting as they strive to create the formal ideals of the new society; they are the heralds and the harbingers of a new classicism that is yet to come.²³

For Molnár the classicism of Bartók and Kodály had become the key-word for a future style, whose arrival, he felt, was so far in the future that he never thought of connecting it in any way to the young composers Kodály was training in his classroom while he was writing. Molnár did say in 1947: "The works of the new Hungarian generation are unthinkable without Bartók and Kodály; they have lit their torches from the fire of the [two masters]"²⁴. Yet he never suggested that any member of the new generation might actually have done more than follow in Bartók's and Kodály's footsteps to help bring on that longawaited classicism.
All three, however, agreed on the leading role of Hungarian music on the European scene.²⁵ Surveying that scene in 1928, Tóth attempted to sketch out the state of new music and the position of new Hungarian music within it²⁶. He rejected Schoenberg, Hindemith and Stravinsky and praised Bartók as the new Siegfried of music. He closed his article with an enthusiastic appraisal of the life-affirming, humanistic art of Kodály and the young Hungarians just coming out of his classroom:

Whoever listens to this music and immerses himself in its grandiose spirit will be unable to resist the inherent imperative, and will know that we must fill our lives with this music.²⁷

This review by Aladár Tóth exemplifies the militant intolerance characteristic of Hungarian discussions of new music in the 1920s and 1930s. Expressions such as "grandiose spirit", "imperative" and "must" are simply commands for everyone to accept the primacy of Hungarian music. Szabolcsi, too, expressed his fanaticism and bias quite openly; indeed, they became the premise for his scholarship:

Yes, we are biased, we are fanatical, we are "one-sided and ahistorical," opposed to all Holy Music History. Our attackers are right on this point, for this is no longer a question of aesthetics and history, but rather a question of where you belong. One can only fight for an idea to which one is innerly connected; aesthetic viewpoints then become subservient to a more powerful idea. One can only fight for what is better, for what is truer. But for those things one must fight ceaselessly, relentlessly and uncompromisingly. We must fight all champions of darkness, even if we are accused of putting up a "Chinese Wall," of being "conservative reactionaries" and "insane revolutionaries"; for we know that we are the bearers of what is better and what is true.²⁸

In the same year he formulated a blueprint for new Hungarian music, based on Kodály's dictates: "The man who bestows such art on his nation is more than just an outstanding musician: he is a spiritual leader whose work gives direction, defines a programme, and shows the way."²⁹ For many years, these three apologists led the effort to turn that programme into reality. Szabolcsi offered interpretations of Kodály's works³⁰, Molnár proclaimed and popularized the ideas and explained new music,³¹ while Tóth published polemical articles and propaganda in Zenei szemle and Pesti napló.³² We might compare their writings to the synoptic Gospels: they literally repeat or paraphrase Kodály's writings between 1925 and 1929.³³