6 - Practical Music and Practical Textbooks

Summary

By the time of Hindemith's final work catalogued with an opus number – the Concert Music for Strings and Brass (1929–1930) – we have seen that he was writing in a defined, consistent style. He had largely left behind the quasi-expressionistic language of the solo string music and Sancta Susanna, and the Neue Sachlichkeit of the Kammermusiken. Works such as Mathis der Maler and the piano sonatas contrast sharply in style and rhetoric with the earlier provocative and pluralistic works such as the Suite 1922 and op. 11 and op. 25 sonatas. The composer of the nonchalant Ragtime (Well Tempered) became the austere craftsman of the chamber sonatas, the Octet and the American symphonies. A further marked change in emphasis included Hindemith's community music-making, epitomised by Sing- und Spielmusik (Music for Singing and Playing) which began with a work for strings, flutes and oboes for the student orchestra of the Bieberstein boarding school in 1926, and culminated in Plöner Musiktag (1932). It was a prototype for music we now associate with valuable and sustainable education and outreach work. While Hindemith's early career married notable performance activity with compositions that were designed to shock and provoke, his career from 1927 became increasingly concerned with the challenges of teaching, conducting, and composing for the enthusiastic amateur or the marginalised instrumentalist. On the one hand this made him less appealing to the avant garde and yet, on the whole, many works written during the latter period became his most enduring and widely disseminated.

This change in attitude is inextricably linked to Hindemith's interest in music theory. Before arriving in Berlin, Hindemith appeared to have little interest in writing textbooks, whether of a deeply theoretical focus – aimed at the trained musician – or of a comprehensive and practical nature for use by musicians of a wider spectrum of knowledge and ability. He appeared, in print at least, to favour playing and composing music, rather than writing about it. His first publishing arrangement in 1933 shows that his intentions were to write a series of primers (presumably for twentieth-century composition) which ultimately grew into the ambitious and speculative Unterweisung.