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 shattered the empire, his 1923 Psalmus Hungaricus gave a traumatized nation its own musical voice, and in 1935 he and Jeno Adam set out to reform Hungarian school music around a set of principles now known worldwide as the Kodaly method, built on the human voice and the musical mother tongue.

• How Kodaly treated folk songs with the same academic rigor as a Beethoven symphony and why that was culturally subversive
• The reasons his breakthrough came only in his 40s, from a shy temperament to the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire
• The core tenets of his educational philosophy: music is for everyone, learning starts early, and singing comes before reading notes
• His 48-year marriage to Emma Gruber, his marriage at 77 to 19-year-old student Sarolta Peczely, and the revolutionaries who wanted him as president
• Why the solfege hand signs were actually invented by English minister John Curwen, and the 1976 statue in Pecs facing a children’s playground