Eric Warner served as Vice President and Professor of Music at the Conservatory of Music in Saarbruecken and at its gymnasium (1926-1933) and as Professor of Music at the Jewish gymnasium and Jewish Theological Seminary of Breslau (1934-1938). His musical education was highlighted by his studies with Professors Curt Sachs and Guido Adler in the master class of composition at the Berlin State Academy of Music (with Franz Schreker) and then at the Academy of Arts (with Ferruccio Busoni). His compositions were performed by the Hindemith Quartet and by the orchestras of Saarbruecken, Frankfurt, Cincinnati (under Eugene Goossens), Minneapolis (under Dimitri Mitropoulos), and Milan (under Nino Sanzogno). With increased restrictions on Jewish life under the Nazis, in 1938 Dr. Werner emigrated to the US and was subsequently appointed Professor of Jewish Music and Director of the Choir at HUC in Cincinnati. Eventually, Dr. Werner joined HUC-JIR's New York School where, in 1948, he was a founding member of its School of Sacred Music. Awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1957 to study the concepts of liturgy and their influence on the history of church and synagogue music, his research led to publication of The Sacred Bridge: The Interdependence of Liturgy and Music in Synagogue and Church During the First Millennium, the first full-length comparative study of the music of Christian and Jewish liturgies showing the liturgical and musical interdependence of church and synagogue during the first millennium of the Christian era and highlighting the cultural exchanges between East and West that occurred during those centuries. After being named Professor Emeritus at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, Dr. Werner inaugurated the Department of Musicology at Tel Aviv University and served as the first chairman of the department from 1966-1971 and in 1968, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem honored Dr. Werner by dedicating to him Yuval, its first yearbook on Jewish music. In 1982, the Austrian Republic awarded him its Great Golden Sign of Merit, First Class, for his contributions to the arts and sciences. Author of more than 120 learned publications on the history of Jewish music and other musicological subjects, including Mendelssohn: A New Image of the Composer and His Age (1963); A Voice Still Heard: The Sacred Songs of the Ashkenazic Jews (1976). Dr. Werner was also editor of Contributions to a Historical Study of Jewish Music (1976). His collected papers are in the archives of the Leo Baeck Institute.

Zoltán Kodály’s activity as ethnomusicologist developed parallel to his work as a composer, and fertilized it from 1905 onwards. Later folk music achieved an eminent place in Kodály’s music pedagogical concept as well. In 1905 Kodály began visiting remote villages to collect songs, recording them on phonograph cylinders and in 1906 he wrote the thesis on Hungarian folk song ("Strophic Construction in Hungarian Folksong"). Around this time Kodály met fellow composer Béla Bartók, whom he took under his wing and introduced to some of the methods involved in folk song collecting. The two became lifelong friends and champions of each other's music.