With this post I begin a series that will introduce you to some of my personal favorites – composers – and – compositions and arrangements.

I begin with the final movement of an orchestral composition by Paul Hindemith (1895-1963) – born in Germany and came to the United States in 1940.  Hindemith became a citizen of this country in 1946.  The work is the Symphonic Metamorphoses on Themes by Carl Maria von Weber – composed in 1943.  My first awareness of this work was during the time I was studying conducting and composition in the doctoral program at the University of Oklahoma.  I invite you to listen to an impressive performance recorded in 1965 by the Berlin Philharmonic with the composer conducting.  Turn your volume level up and enjoy this stirring performance.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EpxVGaq5TBI

Another monumental work by Hindemith is When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.  This is a magnificent and complex longer work.  I recommend the recording by Robert Shaw with the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus with vocal soloists William Stone, baritone, and Jan DeGaetani, mezzo-soprano.  It was my great pleasure to get to know William Stone during the days we spent together at the University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana.  This recording may be found at

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2Qzuygm6-0

During the semesters that I was privileged to study composition with Michael Hennagin (1936-1993) at the University of Oklahoma I was introduced to Hindemith’s Craft of Musical Composition.  Hindemith begins his text with an introductory quote of Johann Joseph Fux (1660-1741) in the foreword of his Gradus ad Parnassum:

“Perhaps some will wonder at my undertaking to write about music, when there are at hand the opinions of so many excellent [people] who have written learnedly and sufficiently about it, and particularly at my doing so at a time when Music has become an almost arbitrary matter, and composers will no longer be bound by laws and rules, but avoid the names of School and Law as they would Death itself . . .”

Fux’s book was published when the great Johann Sebastian Bach was only forty years old.

Hindemith then adds his own analysis of his current situation:

“A musician who feels called upon in these times to contribute to the preservation and transmission of the craft of composition is, like Fux, on the defensive.  He is, in fact, even more so than Fux, for in no other field of artistic activity has a period of over-development of materials and of their appolication been followed by such confusion as reigns in this one.  We are constantly brought face to face with this confusion by a manner of writing which puts tones together according to no system except that dictated by pure whim, or that into which facile and mileading fingers draw the writer as they glide over the keys.  Now something that cannot be understood by the analysis of a musican, making every conceivable allowance for individual characteristics, cannot possibly be more convincing to the naive listener.  In Die Meistersinger one reads, it is true, that the composer must make his own rules and then follow them.  But this privilege is granted only to a master – one, moreover, who knows, or at least feels, the bases of his work provided by Nature.

It is not surprising that things have developed as they have.  The discovery, in the last century, of the extreme limits of power and subtlety in the effect of musical tone extended the boundaries of the tonal domain at the disposal of the composer into hitherto undreamed-of distances.  New combinations of tones came to be recognized, and new ways of bending a melodic line were discovered.  It seemed as if the sun had risen upon a new, glowing, iridescent land, into whcih our musican-discoverers rushed head-long.  Blinded by the immense store of materials never used before, deafened by the fantastic novelty of sound, everyone seized without reflectiion at whatever he felt he could use.  At this point instruction failed.  Either it fell into the same frenzy as practice, and devoted itself to flimsy speculation, instead of adapting its systems of teaching to the new material, or it lapsed into inactivity, and what had never been a very strong urge towards novelty turned into a barren clinging to the past.  Confidence in inherited methods vanished; they seemed barely adequate now to gude the beginner’s first steps.  Whoever wished to make any progress gave himself unreservedly to the New, neither helped nor hindered by theoretical instruction, which had simply become inadequate to the occasion.” (1-3)

WOW!  We are only able to wonder what Hindemith might write about our situation in this day and time.

Hindemith, Paul.  The Craft of Musical Composition.  Book 1: Theoretical Part.  Fourth edition.  English translation by Arthur Mendel.  Mainz:  Schott, 1942.