{"id":484,"date":"2016-01-13T16:27:42","date_gmt":"2016-01-13T22:27:42","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jameselkins.com\/pianofiles\/?page_id=484"},"modified":"2016-01-13T16:28:58","modified_gmt":"2016-01-13T22:28:58","slug":"hindemith-ludus-tonalis-1942","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/www.jameselkins.com\/pianofiles\/hindemith-ludus-tonalis-1942\/","title":{"rendered":"Hindemith, \u201cLudus Tonalis\u201d (1942)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"PTDC0005\"<\/em><\/p>\n

Ludus tonalis,<\/em>\u00a0which contains “interludes” and fugues in all 24 keys,\u00a0is\u00a0one of the twentieth century\u2019s principal responses to Bach\u2019s Well-Tempered Clavier.<\/em>\u00a0(Another is Shostakovich’s Twenty-four Preludes and Fugues,<\/em> which I also review on this site.)\u00a0An article comparing the Bach and Hindemith pieces was written in 1959 (Hans Tischler, “Hindemith’s Ludus tonalis and Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier: A Comparison.” Music Review<\/em> 20: 217-27), and an internet search turns up several master\u2019s theses on the subject (some in Romania, for some reason).<\/p>\n

Most liner notes and newspaper reviews focus on Hindemith\u2019s harmonic theory, which is embodied in the sequences of fugues, and on the piece\u2019s technical accomplishments.\u00a0There is at\u00a0least one dissertation, Debra Torok\u2019s \u201cPaul Hindemith’s Ludus Tonalis<\/em>: Harmonic fluctuation analysis and its performance implications.\u201d Hindemith apparently said he doubted there were many people left who could appreciate this level of composition. Gabriela Vlahopol\u2019s essay \u201cBaroque Reflections in Ludus Tonalis<\/em> by Paul Hindemith,\u201d which is available on the internet, summarizes the technical points and proposes some (mainly unconvincing) parallels to specific pieces in the WTC.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m not interested in technical analyses of fugues, because I am not sure of\u00a0the purpose of demonstrating permutations of the form in America in the mid-twentieth century.\u00a0<\/span>What matters more, I think, is Ludus tonalis’s\u00a0<\/em>broader relation to\u00a0modernity, and what it meant at that time to look back to the WTC. I suspect that for Hindemith it meant an opportunity to occlude sentiment in the name of complexity of construction.<\/p>\n

Ludus tonalis<\/em> was composed in America, in 1942, and it may have been a response partly to Stravinsky, and perhaps also to early works by Babbitt and others. It would be interesting to know more about what led to the\u00a0impetus to respond to Bach, and to demonstrate his own harmonic theory, at this particular moment. As\u00a0a neoclassical gesture the\u00a0Ludus tonalis<\/em>\u00a0is belated and doctrinaire in comparison to other neoclassicisms, for example Stravinsky\u2019s. It<\/span>\u00a0can seem\u00a0hopeless and comical in its reactionary academicism, and in the idea that modernity, in this case, can be adequately addressed by inventing\u00a0idiosyncratic harmonic theories. Apparently Hindemith\u00a0intended to effect a fusion between eighteenth-century fugue forms and twentieth-century harmonic theory, but if that\u2019s the case then it implies a strange sense of the past: it’s as if\u00a0a particular academic past is somehow required by mid-twentieth century post-tonal music, or\u00a0compatible with it.<\/p>\n

Of the principal composers of his generation, Hindemith\u00a0is perhaps the driest. The humorous pieces here are stilted; the marches are, as usual, harsh, cynical, and\u00a0dissonant, in the manner\u00a0of early modernism; the lento pieces mainly\u00a0avoid strong\u00a0affect. (There are\u00a0a couple of strong exceptions, such as the plaintive\u00a0Interludium<\/em>, no. 19, which I reproduce\u00a0in its entirety here\u2014although at the tempo Hindemith has indicated, the piece also loses some of the poignance it might have at a slightly faster tempo; see Sviatoslav Richter’s performance<\/a> for example.)<\/span><\/p>\n

\"PTDC0002\"<\/span><\/p>\n

At least one\u00a0slow piece,\u00a0Interludium<\/em>, no. 15, seems crafted to avoid sentiment, even though its form (walking bass, counterpoint of singing alto and soprano voices) is exactly what composers up through Prokofiev used for explicitly expressive purposes.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"PTDC0001\"Hindemith was always capable of machine-gun fast marches, which have a sort of heavy wit (the best here is Interludium<\/em> no. 7, \u201cScherzando\u201d), but as in Reger, such pieces tend to be\u00a0leaden: even the playfulness is ponderous.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"PTDC0003\"<\/span><\/p>\n

The opening piece, which is mirrored and inverted in\u00a0the closing piece (another technical feat\u2014see below) is the most varied in expression; it borrows, for example, from Bach\u2019s Chromatic Fantasy and Fugue<\/em>. It has a slightly sad \u201cArioso\u201d \u2014but only slightly sad, because most of Hindemith\u2019s attention is focused on the possibilities of mirroring in the closing piece.<\/span><\/p>\n

\"PTDC0004\"<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u00a0would not\u00a0propose a lack of expressiveness as a failure, because the inexpressive, the grey, the technical, the private, are all part of what Hindemith\u2019s music does. But I haven\u2019t seen a good discussion of this problem in the literature. At times he was working with forms traditionally\u00a0aimed at expressiveness (like nocturnes and other slow pieces), and in those cases\u00a0his constrained sense\u00a0of wit, his reticence about intimacy, seem more pointless than perverse. But at other times, when he is working out a difficult fugue form, then the expression is properly in the form, as it was in The Art of Fugue.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Hindemith is a puzzle for me: mainly stiff and brittle, but occasionally plaintive, playful, acidic, or even playful (he cartooned lions in the original edition<\/a> of his piece). Or, to put is differently, mostly severe and neoclassical, but partly late Romantic. But always with the laces tied, always with a sharp but\u00a0deliberate sense of wit and a preference for steel gray. Taruskin notes composers who said that among the postwar options in North America, Hindemith seemed too easy to emulate: an interesting perception, indicating at once that his style or manner was strong, and that it therefore seemed narrow.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ludus tonalis,\u00a0which contains “interludes” and fugues in all 24 keys,\u00a0is\u00a0one of the twentieth century\u2019s principal responses to Bach\u2019s Well-Tempered Clavier.\u00a0(Another …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jameselkins.com\/pianofiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/484"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jameselkins.com\/pianofiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jameselkins.com\/pianofiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jameselkins.com\/pianofiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.jameselkins.com\/pianofiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=484"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/www.jameselkins.com\/pianofiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/484\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":486,"href":"http:\/\/www.jameselkins.com\/pianofiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/484\/revisions\/486"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.jameselkins.com\/pianofiles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=484"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}