Zoltan Kodaly And Asteroid 10918 Kodaly - Budapest, Hungary
Posted by: 
dtrebilc
N 47° 29.960 E 019° 02.223
34T E 352164 N 5262522
Zoltan Kodaly was a musician, linguist, philosopher who devised a music teaching method for children. As well as having an asteroid named after him, his method of hand signals for music notation was included in Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
Waymark Code: WMKX4G
Location: Budapest, Hungary
Date Posted: 06/06/2014
Views: 7
The Statue
Situated in a quiet corner of the grounds around Buda Castle, the statue shows Zoltan reclining in a relaxed pose on a stone bench. He is sitting with his legs crossed at the ankle.
The person
Zoltan learned to play the violin as a child and developed an interest in Hungarian folk music. Between 1905 and 1906 he visited remote villages to collect songs, recording them on phonograph cylinders. He also wrote the thesis on Hungarian folk song ("Strophic Construction in Hungarian Folksong")
His main interest in life became improving the teaching of music to school children. The first music primary school, in which music was taught daily, opened in 1950. The school was so successful that over one hundred music primary schools opened within the next decade. After about fifteen years roughly half the schools in Hungary were music schools. His ideas were also used in other countries.
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Extraterrestrial Links
Asteroid 10918 Kodaly is a main-belt asteroid discovered on January 1, 1998 by Spacewatch at Kitt Peak. Main belt asteroids are in a region of the Solar System located roughly between the orbits of the planets Mars and Jupiter.
His teaching method using hand signals is so famous that in fiction it was used in the film 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind' when UFOlogists were trying to use music to communicate with the aliens that had landed in their space craft.