This material is the only known exchange in writing between Schenker and a leading contemporary composer to address technical and aesthetic matters. Hindemith had begun his professional life as an orchestral violinist in 1915, and was soon composing prolifically. From 1923 he focused his performing activities on the Amar Quartet, which played only contemporary music, and on composing. In 1927 he became a teacher of composition in Berlin, and began to develop the interest in music pedagogy that intensified after his move to the United States in 1937 and resulted in several theoretical texts. His letter to Schenker is an early indication of his thinking about tonality and, with that, his views on the teaching and practice of composition.

Aged 31 in October 1926, Hindemith was responding to this comment by Schenker, published just four months earlier:

It is no surprise that Hindemith’s blithe rhetorical ploy of asserting basic affinities between their views on music failed to break down the well-practised Schenkerian resistance to the blandishments of committed modernists. Even if Schenker had lived long enough to study Hindemith’s Craft of Musical Composition and heard such major compositions as Mathis der Maler and Ludus Tonalis, it is unlikely that he would have changed his mind. Despite Hindemith’s claim in his letter that “the fundamentals of musical activity […] are every as bit as important for our music of today as for that of times gone by,” his eventual proposition, according to Robert Wason, that “all chords have ‘roots’ (determined by the root of their lowest, most ‘consonant’ interval),” was scarcely compatible with a theory owing more to Fuxian counterpoint than to the fundamental bass.

Matthew Brown has argued that “Schenker was extremely flexible in his handling of highly chromatic music,” and “claimed that composers can never write too chromatically in tonal contexts.”