It is the nexus of Hungarian politics, culture, commerce, and industry. Nearly 2 million people live in Budapest and like the Twin Cities of Minneapolis and St. Paul; the Danube River divides the city into Buda and Pest. Travel guides often claim Budapest to be one of the most beautiful cities in Europe and the guides are correct. Forbes ranks it as “Europe's 7th most idyllic place to live."I arrived in Budapest on Saturday afternoon after a flight from Newark and then Zurich. My former student Andi Reith, who lives in both Munich and Budapest, met me at the hotel – the Gellert Hotel, one of the old grand hotels of Europe and renowned for its spa and baths. We climbed part of Gellert Hill to view the city at night and it was truly breathtaking. Andi cooked a traditional Hungarian dinner complete with chicken paprikash and wine made at the family vineyard. On Sunday, we toured Jewish Budapest, visiting the remains of the ghetto, two beautiful synagogues,
and a monument to those who perished in the Holocaust. We wondered through an open-air food festival. I passed on the Rooster stew. 
At dinner we joined László Norbert Nemes, the director of the Kodály Institute. The purpose of my visit was to meet with Professor Nemes to discuss possibilities for collaboration with Westminster through online and distance learning. Graciously, he invited me to make a presentation on Critical Pedagogy for Music Education to his staff and the students at the Institute and to visit his choral conducting class at the Liszt Academy. I saw the conducting class on Monday and traveled by train the Kodály Institute on Tuesday.
On Monday evening, I attended a performance of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat performed in Hungarian with English subtitles. It was wonderful.
Kecskemét is small town in central Hungary is a 90-minute train ride to the south from Budapest. Since the 12th century, the town has been know for its markets and has the most famous examples of Hungarian Art Nouveau architecture. In the main square one sees a Catholic Church built in the style of Louis 16 of France, the Town Hall, the Franciscan Church built in the 14th century a Calvinist church, the Lutheran Church, a theatre, a conference center that was once a synagogue and of course, the Zoltán Kodály Pedagogical Institute of Music.
A former Franciscan monastery, erected in 1736, in the center of town the building was renovated in the 1970s to house the Institute. There is an impressive exhibition of Kodály's life and work; beautiful wood furnishings throughout, and an extensive collection of books and documents in nearly every language in the library (including my own Case Studies in Music Education text).
I observed two classes during my visit. At the Liszt Academy in Budapest, I watched a choral conducting class. To conduct, students had to first play and sing the music on the piano from memory. They sang one part and played the others. At the Institute, I watched a solfège class where students also had to play 3 parts of Bach Chorales and sing the 4th. Everyone had wonderful piano skills and students appeared to play and sing with relative ease. It was quite impressive.
I spoke for about an hour on Critical Pedagogy for Music Education to an audience of students from Ireland, Singapore, the United States, Canada, Africa and the United Kingdom. Several Institute faculty also attended. We talked about how Kodály’s work mirrored that of Paulo Freire, about the shifting roles of teachers, about the goal to empower musicianship in children and how Critical Pedagogy might provide a perspective to view music education and how Kodály methodology might provide the scaffolding for children to develop musical literacy. We talked about Kodály’s vision for music education and how that vision might extend into the 21st century, particularly at a time when technology is rich in children’s lives.
The students and faculty were very receptive and open to new ideas and to dialogue. Professor Nemes will visit Westminster in April and we hope to have collaboration in place for our respective students very soon.
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