What if the Kodály approach, as seen through the eyes of the first Mrs. Kodály, was originally a vision to decolonize Hungarian music? Zoltán Kodály (1882-1967) wrote, “WHAT IS HUNGARIAN IN MUSIC?” (1939) to educate young music-lovers in a new idea of nation based upon folk music he had collected in rural villages. As these “new” folk tunes became standard, and the Kodály concept globalized to other countries around the world, Kodály’s music education approach became associated with deeply entrenched, exclusionary nationalism. However, early letters and diaries of Zoltán and his first wife Emma Kodály (1863-1958) reveal that their shared project of collecting and arranging folk music might have been decolonial in nature, growing from their fin-de-siecle desire to break free from Austrian Habsburg cultural hegemony. I use Mignolo and Walsh’s (2018) perspectives on decoloniality to retell the story of Emma Kodály’s musical collaboration with her husband, including their joint development of the Kodály concept of music education. Even in the fields of Austrian and Hungarian Studies, it is relatively new to examine Habsburg dominance through colonial and post-colonial lenses (Rupnow & Singerton, 2023). In addition, only recently have scholars begun to interrogate the assumption of “colonial innocence” that small, former-Habsburg Central European nations on the global semiperiphery like Hungary could not themselves be complicit in coloniality simply because they had no colonies (Rampley, 2021; Gyuris et al., 2024). The dialogue between Emma and Zoltán - a push-and-pull between two Hungarian-identifying musicians with very different musical and cultural backgrounds - embodies the tension of imperial subjects who have been raised in and benefited from Habsburg coloniality negotiating a disruption to the Habsburg colonial matrix of power in a creative exploration of new Hungarian music. She, being Jewish, bourgeois, and brought up in the German Romantic classical piano tradition, in many ways reigns in her ethnic Magyar husband’s youthful call for a revolution in Hungarian music rooted entirely in ancient folk song, opening space for pluriversal expressions of Hungarianness, such those popularized by Roma (so-called “Gypsy”) musicians. Emma’s dialogue with her husband challenges his binaries without asserting universals of her own. Her influence on what is now understood as the Kodály approach could be described as “relational,” much in the way that Juliet Hess (2015) recommends decolonizing music education as a rhizomatic process. This paper attempts to decolonize the Kodály narrative by foregrounding the historically excluded voice of Emma.