On Music
NEWLIN, DIKA
ON MUSIC By Dika Newlin Hindemith vs. Hindemith Often in the history of music a requiem composed for another has turned out to be the composer's own—Mozart's Requiem, for instance, and...
...has already missed a lot in school and therefore has now to experience tonic and dominant anew...
...So be it—but the music in question (whether you like to call it Gebrauchs or not) did and does exist, and Hindemith could not will it out of existence...
...Living his life backwards, this man, hardly reborn...
...Could it have been this very Hindemith work (if not something by Stravinsky) which touched off Schoenberg's blast in the polemic preface to his too-little-known Three Satires (finished at the end of 1925): "I am aiming at those who claim that they are striving to go 'Back to . . .' Such a person should not strive to make us believe that he has the power to control how far back he will soon find himself—let alone that he will, by this means, come near to one of the great masters . . . whom he already approaches too closely when he merely mentions his name...
...and such choral pieces as In Praise of Music (Frau Musica, 1928, revised 1943), which, not intended for the concert hall or for professional musicians, eschew the 19th-century idolization of the virtuoso in favor of a "do-ityourself" approach to music...
...Schoenberg said that musicians like Telemann live "only because of the musicologists' interest in dead, decayed matter...
...Let us look at the case of Gebrauchsmusik...
...4 (1927...
...melodies so inspired that they cannot be played or understood," "Trismegistus-like systems of composition...
...Rapt by a passage capable of evoking the strongest emotional response, such as the magnificent orchestral beginning of this work, we are suddenly brought up short by typical examples of Hindemithian "busy" counteipoint, which somehow always reminds me of the composer's penchant for fabricating "Klever Kristmas Kards" and playing with toy trains...
...the fugue becomes the fugato...
...Real counterpoint is dissolved into the more or less contrapuntal Bewegungsimpulse (motor impulses...
...But music that is fun to play—as some of Telemann is, and the best of Hindemith—will always have its niche...
...was indeed troubling...
...But we have a right to be disturbed when a composer suddenly repudiates concepts which seem to have been meaningful to him...
...Rating Hindemith by his own high standard, should I place him on the same lofty height as his adored Bach...
...We might mention the musical play for children, Let's Build a Town (1930...
...Seldom performed, the work was revived by the New York Philharmonic with Louise Parker, George London, and the Schola Cantorum of New York, under the composer's direction, in April 1963—nine months before his death last December 28...
...Up to this day it has been impossible to kill the silly term and the unscrupulous classification that goes with it...
...nonetheless, a few preliminary thoughts might not come amiss...
...2 (Op...
...This he blamed upon the "outgrown" belief that a new polyphonic period was in the making at the time he wrote it...
...Apart from the ugliness of the word—in German it is as hideous as its English equivalents workaday music, music for use...
...The Requiem embodies certain contradictions which are, it seems to me, implicit in Hindemith's whole creative life...
...36), a concerto for piano with 12 solo instruments, played in 1925 at the Venice Festival of the International Society for Contemporary Music...
...All this is pleasant enough, but apparently the older Hindemith did not like to be reminded of it...
...It came with a preface by the composer, the implications of which were startling, to say the least...
...On January 23, 1949, the revised Marienleben was unveiled by Jennie Tourel and Erich Itor Kahn...
...Future generations will do this better than we...
...Let us keep it there without trying to enshrine it where it does not belong, and, to paraphrase Eric Werner, "demand to hear Mendelssohn and Stravinsky and Schoenberg and Hindemith...
...utility music, and similar verbal beauties—nobody found anything remarkable in it...
...However, to reveal to him the 'rules of the game' is superfluous, because his mastery consists in 'corriger la fortune' and offers the guarantee that he will help himself out one way or another, while peeking into his involuntary partner's cards...
...In the work of every great composer, of course, we expect to see evolution, change of style...
...Some busybody had written a report on that totally unimportant discussion, and when, years after, I first came to this country, I felt like the sorcerer's apprentice who had become the victim of his own conjurations: The slogan Gebrauchsmusik hit me wherever I went, it had grown to be as abundant, useless and disturbing as thousands of dandelions in a lawn...
...The whole tasty dish was spiced with ill-concealed innuendoes concerning "unheard-of and unheard harmonies...
...Hindemith once defined his view of greatness: "If music has the power to direct our entire existence toward nobleness, this music is great...
...44, no...
...One could not know that Hindemith would not be visiting America again (he had been absent for 12 years), nor that the recording of this performance would arrive as a memorial to the composer himself...
...If a composer has dominated his music to the point of greatness, he has achieved the utmost...
...Perhaps Hindemith never entirely escaped the dangers of "Back to Bach"-ism—an attitude examplified, for instance, in Hindemith's Kammermusik No...
...When one thinks about a composer recently dead, the temptation is irresistible to try to assess his "place in music history...
...the five pieces in first position for string orchestra, Op...
...Since, besides, many a loudly hailed 'renaissance' soon proved to be a secret miscarriage, let us simply say that such a composer writes, of his own free will, as inadequately as a poor conservatory student is forced to write...
...Hindemith, recanting his former beliefs in a manner curiously reminiscent of the tergiversations of certain Soviet composers, took masochistic delight in calling attention to the "unsingability" of much of the first version...
...Hindemith not only used the word, but made a great many contributions to this area of music which may not be "deathless masterpieces" but do serve their intended purpose effectively...
...I was reminded of such thoughts while listening to the recently issued Columbia recording of Hindemith's When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd (A Requiem for Those We Love)—a performance often moving, in spite of regrettably unclear choral diction...
...Whatever else I had written or said at that time remained deservedly unknown, and of my music very few pieces had reached this country...
...This work was written in 194546...
...No, perhaps nearer to Telemann, that prolific producer of the Baroque, frequently preferred to Bach by the audiences of their time...
...I suppose Schoenberg's remark about the "round-trip ticket through the styles" still rankled...
...Listen to him in A Composer's World (1952): "A quarter of a century ago, in a discussion with German choral conductors, 1 pointed out the danger of an esoteric isolationism in music by using the term Gebrauchsmusik...
...The spectacle of a composer publicly excoriating himself for having written music which he must once have considered noble (else why write it at all...
...finished a little over a year after Franklin Delano Roosevelt's death, it might be considered a memorial to him, even as Whitman's poem on which it is based is a tribute to the memory of Lincoln...
...Hindemith Often in the history of music a requiem composed for another has turned out to be the composer's own—Mozart's Requiem, for instance, and Berg's Violin Concerto, which, written as a "Requiem für Manon" (Alma Mahler's daughter) turned out to be his valedictory to life...
...A more disturbing case to me was that concerning the "revised version" of the song-cycle Das Marienleben (to texts by Rilke...
...One would like to help him out with a round-trip ticket through the styles...
...but that ugly term showed a power of penetration and a vigor that would be desirable for worthier formulations...
...The term might best be translated "music for practical use," i.e., for a specific occasion and purpose...
Vol. 47 • December 1964 • No. 26
