Closing of the 2018-2019 Academic Year
With the closing ceremony on 31 May the 2018-2019 academic year officially ended at the Kodály Institute.
True to its tradition, the ceremony started with music making and ended with music making: the Institute Choir, conducted by Árpád Tóth, sang a piece by Giovanni Croce and after Director László Nemes handed out the diplomas, faculty members Renáta Darázs and Balázs Székely gave a recital.
László Nemes talked about the significance of this academic year as "it marks the end of the first academic year that we completed outside our beloved home, the building of the 18th-century Franciscan monastery." And although "the daily operation was not void of problems but we have made it and I feel that none of the daily problems affected the most important aspect of our everyday life which is teaching and learning." He was happy to announce that "as a result of the final examinations taking place yesterday, the first batch of students completing our new two-year master programme will all graduate with Excellent with Distinction mark in their degrees. Our two bachelor students achieved similarly high grades: excellent or excellent with distinction.
These students are going to receive their degrees on 29 June at the Liszt Academy in Budapest.
During the closing ceremony, Director László Nemes also recognised three colleagues of the Institute. Zsuzsanna Polyák from the Institute's Library and Archives received a certificate of merit for her 15 years, while Katalin Szarka from Finances for her 30 years of dedicated work. 
Zsuzsanna Kontra from the teaching faculty was greeted on the occasion of her retirement and 30 years of teaching at the Institute.
When recognising her László Nemes said that "I would like to say thanks and express my sincere appreciation for your work that contributed to the success of our joint efforts to make this Institute into a place that attracts many students who come here to study with some of the best Hungarian music educators who do not only dedicate their professional lives to the continuation of the great Hungarian tradition of teaching and learning music in the spirit of Kodály, but who also try to keep this tradition alive in a world where dynamic processes encouraging the acceptance of new ideas, new things, transformation and continuous change occasionally operate much stronger than those encouraging changeless stability. And because we embrace and appreciate our postmodern culture we have created and we are living in, and we, with a totally open mind and heart, accept this continuous change around us, we have decided to respond to it."