8/3/2023 0 Comments Ludas tonalis![]() However, in fifteen years, his notions of tonality and aesthetics would change. Hindemith regarded it as pointing to a way out of the "chaos" of Modernism. Actually, I can think of few composers who could conceive of a work like this. He very clearly wants us to consider the score as a modern equivalent of Bach's Art of the Fugue. Hindemith composed the work as a kind of summa of his theories of tonality and aesthetics. The fugues display a wealth of contrapuntal techniques, including double and triple fugues, palindromic fugues, various "learned" canonic procedures. The interludes – character-pieces, really – modulate from the previous key center to the new. Each fugue is in one of the 12 chromatic key centers, and Hindemith very carefully works out the placement of each. It is a series of 12 three-part fugues separated by "interludes" and framed by a "Preludium" and a "Postludium." The postlude is the prelude played upside-down and backwards. Ludus Tonalis (the tonal game) appeared 20 years later, during Hindemith's American exile, musically one of his most fruitful periods. Mostly spare, quiet, and melancholy, it nevertheless surely builds to a brief outcry before it recedes again. The Nachtstück movement interests me the most, for it has more in common with the composer Hindemith eventually became. The march, ragtime, and the outer sections of the shimmy clatter and crash into things, heavy-footed with thick chords, far from Hindemith's mature piano writing. The lack of shock now allows a listener to concentrate on the music itself, rather than on its appropriateness. I've always liked the rambunctious Suite. Hindemith himself hinted to his publisher Willy Strecker at Schott that the firm needn't reissue the set, although he shied away from straightforward withdrawal. He instructs the player to treat the piano as a odd sort of percussion instrument, rather than as the vehicle of Chopinesque song. To some extent, Hindemith is kicking over trashcans, for the sheer love of noise and shock. The movements include a march, nocturne, and three based popular pre-jazz dances – shimmy (a type of fox trot), Boston (a slow jazzy waltz), and ragtime. The Suite "1922" comes from the title year and out of Twenties experimentalism. In the Fifties, he changed again, with an expanded view of tonality – one which, incidentally, attempted to synthesize harmonic practice from modality through dodecaphony. He, to a large extent, forged his own harmonic language – one based on fourths, rather than on the usual thirds. Expressionism, jazz, and Dada mostly fell away. Where Stravinsky tended to model his works on Handel and, mainly, Mozart, Hindemith looked to Bach. ![]() After World War I, he got caught up in various artistic movements of the Twenties: Dada, jazz, Expressionism, and the Young (or New) Classicism, a German phenomenon distinct from the Paris brand launched by Stravinsky. Hindemith began under the influence of Brahms and Reger. This CD gives us glimpses of Hindemith at two quite different stages of his career. Music of such depth, wit, craft, and sheer tonal beauty doesn't come along so often that we can afford to ignore it. I can't say everything I've heard struck me as undeservedly neglected, but I can say it of the majority. Francis, concertos for clarinet, horn, trumpet and bassoon, cello, and violin, chamber operas, chamber music in general, oratorios, short choruses, and much more. Of course, his two hits, the Symphonic Metamorphoses and the Mathis der Maler Symphony, continue to draw recordings, but works that should stand among the best of the last century go begging: the Philharmonic Concerto, the Konzertmusiken, the Symphonies in E-flat and B-flat, the ballet St. There's a lot of good, even great Hindemith music to catch up with. Why Hindemith's reputation should still languish in the cellar remains a mystery to me. But it's been years since serialism had anything like a hegemony among composers. Ironically, late Schoenberg and late Hindemith sound very much alike, never mind the procedures they use. In a way, Hindemith made a huge career mistake by setting himself as the polemic opposite to Schoenberg and dodecaphony – the anti-Schoenberg – because he mistakenly believed that tonality was "natural." As a result he became a punching bag for the other side, which excommunicated him from the One True Church of Modernism and buried his music. ![]() ![]() I have no idea why the music of Hindemith currently lies under such a cloud, other than there's a lot of it and it's easier to ignore it than to engage with it. Summary for the Busy Executive: Jekyll and Hyde. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |