Paul Hindemith emphasized a new trend toward music as a social activity through his concepts of Gebrauchsmusik(music for use) and Hausmusik(music to be performed at home).
Paul Hindemith began his composing career as an expressionist, exploring musical territory opened up by Arnold Schoenberg and Béla Bartók. His 1919 setting of dramatist Oskar Kokoschka’s Mörder, Hoffnung der Frauen (pr. 1909; Murderer, the Women’s Hope, pb. 1963) is an example of his use of dissonance with an extremely shocking text.
Hindemith’s early creative years coincided with the Weimar Republic, which governed Germany in the wake of World War I after Emperor William II abdicated in defeat and was replaced by a democratic regime. The culture of the Weimar Republic
Beginning in 1922 and for most of the remainder of the decade, Hindemith associated with a movement known as New Objectivity
Hindemith’s piano suite of 1922 clearly shows elements of both expressionism and New Objectivity. The harmonic texture is extremely dissonant, but the individual movements have parodistic subtitles: The opening march is a circus, not a military march, and is treated parodically. Such popular dances as the shimmy and the Boston (a kind of waltz) and even ragtime are included in the suite. The ragtime movement bears directions that tell the performer to forget skills learned in piano lessons and to treat the piano as an interesting kind of percussion instrument.
The opera Neues vom Tage (news of the day),
Hindemith’s rise in the 1920’s was meteoric. He developed a style that, in its spare lines and linear writing, can be compared to the contemporaneous architecture of the German Bauhaus school. In 1927, he was appointed professor of composition at the Berlin Staatliche Hochschule für Musik despite his lack of formal academic training and his activity as a practical musician, writing music for his own performances (he was one of the world’s foremost violists) as well as concertos and solo pieces for others. He received prestigious commissions, including one to produce concert music for the fiftieth anniversary of the Boston Symphony in 1930. He felt, however, that much modern music was becoming too isolated from its audience; in 1929, he wrote an article in which he stated that the old music public was dying out and that a new one would have to be created. Here lay the roots of a musical philosophy called, for want of a better name, Gebrauchsmusik, or “music for use.”
The term itself derived from the work of musical historians who wrote about the dance suite of the early seventeenth century; these scholars made distinctions between music written to accompany actual dancing and dancelike music written for artistic performances. In its strictest sense, Gebrauchsmusik has no independent value in itself but serves a special use, especially for radio or film, and is the opposite of art or concert music. Hindemith was later to repudiate this term, saying that it sounds as ugly in German as it does in English. His goal, rather, was the creation of community music (Gemeinschaftsmusik), with the idea that the young public he was striving to educate should be making music themselves rather than listening to compositions in a concert hall or on records.
Hindemith’s model in this effort was Hausmusik, works of music from the fifteenth through the eighteenth centuries that were written for performances in the home. Examples are the Glogauer Liederbuch, a set of vocal and instrumental pieces by mostly unnamed composers written in the late fifteenth century, and various collections of ensemble pieces by German composers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Franz Joseph Haydn’s early string quartets, for example, were written for mostly amateur performers.
A good example of Hindemith’s community music is the Plöner Musiktag (day of music at Plon),
At the same time, Hindemith was changing his musical style. Characteristic of much Weimar culture during the early 1930’s was an artistic conservatism marked by the use of older forms and structures; Hindemith followed this trend by reviving older musical forms, such as the sonata, the fugue, and the passacaglia (a repeated melodic pattern in the bass over which new and increasingly elaborate designs are contrived).
When the Nazi Party took power in Germany in the 1930’s, the party’s leaders stressed the need for community—but in a restricted ethnic and racist sense that was unlike the universal community Hindemith had in mind for his music. When the Nazis attacked Hindemith’s music as degenerate, it was for the music of his New Objectivity period, his parodies of marches, and his association with Jewish musicians such as Kurt Weill and Otto Klemperer. Nazi propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels attacked Neues vom Tage as obscene and sensational.
Hindemith’s major work of these years was his opera Mathis der Maler (1934),
Mathis der Maler received its long-delayed premiere under the conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler in 1938. Furtwängler had championed Hindemith’s music; he had conducted the premiere of the symphony drawn from the opera in 1934 and had gotten in trouble with the Nazis for doing so. Hindemith had been given an extended leave of absence from the Berlin Hochschule, during which he toured and even advised the Turkish government on music education. He visited the United States for the first time in 1937, and he gladly accepted a position on the faculty at Yale University in 1940.
At Yale, he taught theory and composition for thirteen years and also organized and directed the Collegium Musicum, a group organized to perform early music from the Middle Ages through the time of Johann Sebastian Bach. A strict teacher who granted only twelve graduate degrees in composition during this period, he influenced a number of musicians and, despite a heavy teaching load, continued to compose.
His attitude toward community music and music for use revealed itself in a variety of ways. Foremost are the sonatas he wrote for virtually every instrument, not only those with a substantial repertoire but also those, such as the English horn, tuba, double bass, trombone, or viola, for which there were few worthwhile compositions. His trumpet sonata particularly set the standard for all subsequent extended compositions for the instrument. Despite their difficult and sometimes thickly written piano parts, these sonatas remain Hindemith’s most frequently performed compositions.
Second are his orchestral showpieces, beginning with the 1930 concert music written for the Boston Symphony. Among the most popular of his orchestral works are his Symphonic Metamorphoses of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber (1943),
Hindemith’s most American work, the Requiem: For Those We Love of 1946,
Finally, Hindemith codified his musical ideas and techniques in a series of treatises. His Unterweisung im Tonsatz (1937-1939; The Craft of Musical Composition, 1941)
Hindemith’s musical style was so individual that he could not develop a school of composers. His idea of educational music was effectively continued by Carl Orff, whose Schulwerk was written for children to perform and featured drums and tuned percussion as the principal instruments. Orff’s methods were brought to North America early in the 1960’s and have since become a favored way of introducing children to music.
Hindemith resigned from Yale in 1953 to accept an appointment at the University of Zurich, from which he retired two years later. He had been actively teaching for more than twenty-five years and wanted to devote himself to conducting. His interests had also turned to vocal music; his last composition, finished two months before his death, was a setting of the Mass written for a virtuoso choir. An octet Hindemith wrote in 1958 is an excellent illustration of his post-American style, combining lyricism with humor, Baroque contrapuntal techniques with old-fashioned dances such as the waltz, polka, and galop. Igor Stravinsky’s and Hindemith’s octets can very well serve as the framing works for a neoclassical style in twentieth century music.
-
Austin, William. Music in the Twentieth Century. New York: W. W. Norton, 1966. Discussion of twentieth century music includes a chapter on Hindemith that provides an excellent capsule introduction to his music and musical philosophy. -
Burns, Rob, ed. German Cultural Studies: An Introduction. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Collection of scholarly essays on German culture and society since 1871 includes a chapter on the “birth of modernism” in the Weimar Republic. -
Cook, Susan C. Opera for a New Republic. Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1988. Study of German opera during the 1920’s emphasizes works by Hindemith. Also includes chapters on New Objectivity and on the effect of jazz on European music. -
Hindemith, Paul. A Composer’s World: Horizons and Limitations. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1952. Collection of the lectures that Hindemith gave at Harvard during the 1949-1950 academic year. States his musical philosophy for the general reader and emphasizes his moral and ethical view of the art. -
Hinton, Stephen. The Idea of Gebrauchsmusik. New York: Garland, 1989. Useful source of information on the origins and cultural background of the concept of Gebrauchsmusik. The musical information provided is directed toward specialists. -
Kater, Michael H. Composers of the Nazi Era: Eight Portraits. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Examines the careers of eight German composers who were working, whether in Germany or as exiles, during the time the Nazis were in power. Chapter 2 is devoted to Hindemith. Includes endnotes and index. -
Laqueur, Walter. Weimar: 1918-1933. 1974. Reprint. London: Phoenix Press, 2002. One of the best studies available in English of the Weimar Republic and its variegated cultural life. Discusses both art and music. -
Noss, Luther. Paul Hindemith in the United States. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989. Describes the composer’s life and activities in the United States, mostly between 1937 and 1953, with brief discussion of his later years. Includes bibliography and indexes.
Scriabin’s Prometheus Premieres in Moscow
German Artists Found the Bauhaus
Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue Premieres in New York
Brecht and Weill Collaborate on the Mahagonny Songspiel