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Paul Hindemith (16 November
1895 – 28 December 1963) was a
German composer, violist,
violinist, teacher, music
theorist and conductor.
Born in Hanau, Germany,
Hindemith was taught the violin
as a child. He entered the
Hochsche Konservatorium in
Frankfurt am Main where he
studied conducting, composition
and violin under Arnold
Mendelssohn and Bernhard
Sekles, supporting himself by
playing in dance bands and
musical-comedy outfits. He
acted as concertmaster of the
Frankfurter Museumsorchester
from 1915 to 1923 and played in
the Rebner string quartet from
1914 in which he played second
violin, and later the viola. In
1921 he founded the Amar
Quartet, playing viola, and
extensively toured Europe.
In 1922, some of his pieces
were heard in the International
Society for Contemporary Music
festival at Salzburg, which
first brought him to the
attention of an international
audience. The following year,
he began to work as an
organizer of the Donaueschingen
Festival, where he programmed
works by several avant garde
composers, including Anton
Webern and Arnold Schoenberg.
From 1927 he taught composition
at the Berliner Hochschule für
Musik in Berlin. In the 1930s
he made a visit to Cairo and
several visits to Ankara where
(at the invitation of Atatürk)
he led the task of reorganizing
Turkish music education and the
early efforts for the
establishment of Turkish State
Opera and Ballet. Towards the
end of the 1930s, he made
several tours in America as a
viola and viola d'amore
soloist.
Hindemith's relationship to the
Nazis is a complicated one:
some condemned his music as
"degenerate" (largely on the
basis of his early, sexually
charged operas such as Sancta
Susanna), and on December 6
1934, during a speech at the
Berlin Sports Palace, Germany’s
Minister of Propaganda, Joseph
Goebbels publicly denounced
Hindemith as an “atonal
noisemaker.” Others, though,
thought that he might provide
Germany with an example of a
modern German composer, who by
this time was writing music
based in tonality, and with
frequent references to folk
music; the conductor Wilhelm
Furtwängler's defence of
Hindemith, published in 1934,
takes precisely this line. The
controversy around his work
continued throughout the
thirties, with the composer
falling in and out of favour
with the Nazi hierarchy; he
finally emigrated to
Switzerland in 1938 (partly as
his wife was Jewish), and in
the meantime had sworn an oath
to Hitler, had accepted a
commission to write music for a
Luftwaffe event (although it
never materialised), conducted
for official Nazi concerts, and
accepted a position on the
Reich Music Chamber. This part
of Hindemith's life has until
recently been downplayed by
historians of the composer
(such as Skelton or Kemp), who
have mostly tried to assert his
anti-Nazi beliefs.
In 1935, Hindemith was
commissioned by the Turkish
government to reorganize that
country's musical education,
and, more specifically, was
given the task of preparing
material for the “Universal and
Turkish Polyphonic Music
Education Programme” for all
music-related institutions in
Turkey, a feat which he
accomplished to universal
acclaim. This development seems
to have been supported by the
Nazi regime: it may have got
him conveniently out of the
way, yet at the same time he
propagated a German view of
musical history and education.
(Hindemith himself said he
believed he was being an
ambassador for German culture.)
Hindemith did not stay in
Turkey as long as many other
émigrés. Nevertheless, he
greatly influenced the
developments of Turkish musical
life; the Ankara State
Conservatory owes much to his
efforts. In fact, Hindemith was
regarded to be a “real master”
by young Turkish musicians and
he was appreciated and greatly
respected.
In 1940 Hindemith emigrated to
the United States. At the same
time that he was codifying his
musical language, his teaching
and compositions began to be
affected by his theories,
according to critics like
Ernest Ansermet (1961, note to
p. 42 added on an errata slip).
Once in the States he taught
primarily at Yale University
where he had such notable
pupils as Lukas Foss, Norman
Dello Joio, Mel Powell, Harold
Shapero, Hans Otte, Ruth
Schonthal, and Oscar-winning
film director George Roy Hill.
During this time he also gave
the Charles Eliot Norton
Lectures at Harvard, from which
the book A Composer's World was
extracted (Hindemith 1952). He
became an American citizen in
1946, but returned to Europe in
1953, living in Zürich and
teaching at the university
there. Towards the end of his
life he began to conduct more,
and made numerous recordings,
mostly of his own music. He was
awarded the Balzan Prize in
1962.
Hindemith died in Frankfurt am
Main from acute
pancreatitis.
 Hindemith's
music
Hindemith is among the most
significant German composers of
his time. His early works are
in a late romantic idiom, and
he later produced expressionist
works, rather in the style of
early Arnold Schoenberg, before
developing a leaner,
contrapuntally complex style in
the 1920s. It has been
described as neoclassical, but
is very different from the
works by Igor Stravinsky
labeled with that term, owing
more to the contrapuntal
language of Bach than the
Classical clarity of
Mozart.
This new style can be heard in
the series of works he wrote
called Kammermusik (Chamber
Music) from 1922 to 1927. Each
of these pieces is written for
a different small instrumental
ensemble, many of them very
unusual. Kammermusik No. 6, for
example, is a concerto for the
viola d'amore, an instrument
which had not been in wide use
since the baroque period, but
which Hindemith himself played.
He continued to write for
unusual groups throughout his
life, producing a sonata for
double bass in 1949, for
example.
Around the 1930s, Hindemith
began to write less for chamber
groups, and more for large
orchestral forces. In 1933-35,
Hindemith wrote his opera
Mathis der Maler, based on the
life of the painter Matthias
Grünewald. It is respected in
musical circles, but like most
twentieth-century operas it is
rarely staged, though a
well-known production by the
New York City Opera in 1995 was
an exception (Holland 1995). It
combines the neo-classicism of
earlier works with folk song.
Hindemith turned some of the
music from this opera into a
purely instrumental symphony
(also called Mathis der Maler),
which is one of his most
frequently performed works.
Hindemith, like Kurt Weill and
Ernst Krenek, wrote
Gebrauchsmusik (Utility Music),
music intended to have a social
or political purpose and often
intended to be played by
amateurs. The concept was
inspired by Bertolt Brecht. An
example of this is his
Trauermusik (Funeral Music),
written in 1936. Hindemith was
preparing a concert for the BBC
when he heard news of the death
of George V. He quickly wrote
this piece for solo viola and
string orchestra to mark the
event, and the premiere was
given on the same day.
Hindemith later disowned the
term Gebrauchsmusik, saying it
was misleading.
Hindemith's most popular work,
both on record and in the
concert hall, is probably the
Symphonic Metamorphoses of
Themes by Carl Maria von Weber,
written in 1943. It takes
melodies from various works by
Weber, mainly piano duets, but
also one from the overture to
his incidental music for
Turandot (Op. 37/J. 75), and
transforms and adapts them so
that each movement of the piece
is based on one theme.
In 1951, Hindemith completed
his Symphony in B-flat. Scored
for concert band, it was
written for the U.S. Army Band
"Pershing's Own". Hindemith
premiered it with that band on
April 5th of that year . Its
second performance took place
under the baton of Hugh
McMillan, conducting the
Boulder Symphonic Band at the
University of Colorado. The
piece is representative of his
late works, exhibiting strong
contrapuntal lines throughout,
and is a cornerstone of the
band repertoire.
Hindemith's
musical
system
Most of
Hindemith's music uses a
unique system that is
tonal but non-diatonic; it
is centered around a
tonic, and modulates from
one tonal center to
another like most tonal
music, but uses all 12
notes freely rather than
relying on a scale picked
as a subset of these
notes. Hindemith even
rewrote some of his music
after developing this
system. One of the key
features of his system is
that he ranks all musical
intervals of the 12-tone
equally tempered scale
from the most consonant to
the most dissonant. He
classifies chords in six
categories, on the basis
of how dissonant they are,
whether or not they
contain a tritone, and
whether or not they
clearly suggest a root or
tonal center. Hindemith's
philosophy also
encompasses
melody--Hindemith strives
for melodies that do not
clearly outline major or
minor triads.
In the late 1930s, Hindemith
wrote a theoretical book The
Craft of Musical Composition
(Hindemith 1937–70), which lays
out this system in great
detail. It laid out Hindemith's
compositional technique he had
been using throughout the 1930s
and would continue to use for
the rest of his life. Hindemith
also advocated for his system
as a means of understanding and
analyzing the harmonic
structure of other music,
claiming that it has a broader
reach than the traditional
roman numeral approach to
chords (an approach that is
strongly tied to the diatonic
scales). In the same book,
Hindemith uses his system to
analyze his own music alongside
music of J.S. Bach, and even
that of Arnold Schoenberg.
His piano work of the early
1940s, Ludus Tonalis is seen by
many as a further example or
exploration of this system. It
contains twelve fugues, in the
manner of Johann Sebastian
Bach, each connected by an
interlude during which the
music moves from the key of the
last fugue to the key of the
next one. The order of the keys
follows Hindemith's ranking of
musical intervals around the
tonal center of C.
One traditional aspect of
classical music that Hindemith
retains is the idea of
dissonance resolving to
consonance. Much of Hindemith's
music begins in consonant
territory, progresses rather
smoothly into dissonance, and
resolves at the end in full,
consonant chords. This is
especially apparent in his
"Concert Music for Strings and
Brass.
Source : Some
of the information on this page
came from a Wikipedia
article and is
licensed under the GNU
Documentation License.
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www.geneticmatrix.com.
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Paul
Hindemith - Generator
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