In Close Encounters of the Third Kind, the hand signs used to communicate with the alien mothership are credited to a Hungarian composer. The film gets that detail wrong, but the mistake points to a real figure who transformed how human beings learn music. This episode explores the life of Zoltan Kodaly, born in 1882 in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, a composer, ethnomusicologist, linguist and educational philosopher so respected that revolutionaries in 1956 proposed making him president of Hungary.

We follow Kodaly from simultaneous studies in composition and linguistics to his 1905 field trips hauling fragile wax phonograph cylinders into remote villages to record peasant songs, his 1906 thesis on strophic construction, and the lifelong partnership with Bela Bartok that he initiated by teaching him folk-song collecting. After World War I sh ...