Notes to Kodaly's Recent Setting of Hungarian Dances

Even the most individual art has some roots in tradition; and the interest of Kodály's music arises from his faculty to elevate his national inheritance to an unmistakably personal language. Historic consciousness has always been a dominating trait both of the man and his art; he posscsses an extraordinary imagination for relating the spiritual experience of earlier periods to musical forms of contemporary validity. Thus a sixteenth century sermon became one of the choral masterpiece of modern times; a popular tale of Napoleonic times intiated the revival of Hungarian musical theatre; and his folksong choruses laid the foundations of the general musical culture in Hungary to-day.