Recently discovered in a pile of culled folders containing items relating to music , including early Australian Music Examination Board theory of music examination papers , was the 1979 monograph CREATIVE MUSIC-THE KODALY WAY-by Pamela Burton , lecturer in music at the Kelvin Grove College of Advanced Education, Brisbane .
In the International Year of the Child , Australia had been the venue for an international symposium devoted to the ideals of the Hungarian musicologist , composer and educator , Zoltan Kodaly , who spent much of his creative life writing music for children .
The Kodaly philosophy was that music should be accessible to everyone and that singing is the way to achieve this ideal . His technique was described as being essentially a vocal method in which no child learns a melodic instrument until he or she can sing in tune and is able to read and write simple pentatonic tunes .
A pilot program was started in New South Wales primary schools which by 1979 was in its eighth year. Other pilot programs were set up in Victoria, Queensland and South Australia .
Kodaly was a contemporary of Bartok at the Prague Academy of Music ; the two went into the countryside collecting and preserving old Hungarian folk songs . The monograph says Cecil Sharp and Vaughan Williams carried out a similar project in England. Kodaly succeeded Vaughan Williams as chairman of the International Folk Music Council 60 years later .
