In 1900, he entered the Department of Languages at the University of Budapest and at the same time Hans von Kössler's composition class at the Royal Hungarian Academy of Music.

All these works[clarification needed] show great originality of form and content, a blend of highly sophisticated mastery of the western European style of music,[citation needed] including classical, late-romantic, impressionistic and modernist traditions, and on the other hand a profound knowledge and respect for the folk music of Hungary (including the Hungarian-inhabited areas of modern-day Slovakia and Romania, as those territories were part of Hungary).

This was the year when one of his best-known pieces, Psalmus Hungaricus, was given its first performance at a concert to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the union of Buda and Pest (Bartók's Dance Suite premiered on the same occasion.)

Thirteen months later, in December 1959, Kodály married Sarolta Péczely [hu], his 19-year-old student at the Franz Liszt Academy of Music with whom he lived happily until his death in 1967 at the age of 84 in Budapest.

Beginning in 1935, along with his colleague Jenő Ádám (14 years his junior), he embarked on a long-term project to reform music teaching in Hungary's lower and middle schools.

In the motion picture Close Encounters of the Third Kind, a visual learning aid distributed to members of a conference of ufologists was named the Kodály Method and referenced musical notes as hand signals.