Setting the Scene

Not all composers are music theorists, and fewer still publish theoretical textbooks. Of these few, the connection between their music and theory varies: Johann Joseph Fux wrote music in a mature Baroque style, yet his theory codified the earlier polyphonic practice of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina. The French composer Jean-Philippe Rameau wrote an extensive treatise on thorough-bass, beginning with a first part that speculatively justifies the diatonic system using the overtone series. In turn, the Austrian thorough-bass theorists wrote practical treatises which reflected the harmonic character of their music-making, such as Johann Georg Albrechtsberger, Simon Sechter and Anton Bruckner. The German theorist Hugo Riemann took Rameau's speculative application one step further and invented harmonic dualism to objectify the minor mode. Some composer-theorists were prominent composers in their lifetimes. Many were not.

Against this backdrop is a rare occurrence of a composer who turned to the writing of music theory textbooks as a way of streamlining his own compositional style: Paul Hindemith (1895–1963). Though he has been classed among the great composers of the early twentieth century, in the esteemed company of Béla Bartók, Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky, his legacy and music theory remain enigmatic. Unlike Schoenberg, who wrote textbooks to observe features of earlier, diatonic music, Hindemith created a speculative music theory that offered a direction for contemporary composition to follow which did not sever its ties with tonality, and yet used the chromatic scale. He entitled it Unterweisung im Tonsatz.

Hindemith's committed engagement with music theory is, further, unusual given his early popularity as a performer and a composer. His initial achievements in performance included entering the Frankfurt Opera Orchestra aged nineteen and subsequently playing in the Rebner and Amar String Quartets. The status of his technical prowess as a viola soloist was elevated to the highest international standing during the 1920s and 1930s, where he premiered his three viola concertos and, in addition, William Walton's Viola Concerto at infamously short notice. Hindemith performed his viola concertos with some of the leading musicians and ensembles of the twentieth century: for example, his fifth Kammermusik was premiered in November 1927 with the Berlin Staatskapelle under Otto Klemperer. Moreover, these were not isolated performances; Ian Kemp reports that, by 1938, Hindemith had played the Kammermusik ninety times.