How to Practice?

About Sndor Kovcs

Sándor Kovács (1886 1918) was one of Hungarys most beloved young professors and practitioners of music of his eraa piano teacher as well as a music historian and theoristwho published five books during his lifetime including How to Introduce Children to Music with a volume of his writings on music published a decade after his death. Born Sándor Kohn to Jewish parents who took on the Hungarian family name Kovács when he was four years old he graduated from the Franz Liszt Academy of Music where he became the first person in Hungary to write a dissertation on music history. In Berlin he studied under the noted German musicologist Johannes Wolf. From 1910 until his death he was a teacher at the Fodor Music School a distinguished private institution. He participated in the founding of the New Hungarian Music Association (UMZE) and helped popularizing modern Hungarian music especially that Bartók and Kodály both domestically and abroad. He also achieved considerable success as a pianist. As a music educator he broke new ground in Hungary by incorporating findings from the then-new field of psychology. In 1918 at the age of thirty-two he committed suicide by poisoning himself. He was laid to rest in the Kozma Street Jewish cemetery.