Хармоничната система на Паул Хиндемит – опит за преосмисляне на законите в музикалното изкуство
Paul Hindemith’s harmonic system: an attempt to reconsider the rules in musical art

Summary/Abstract: Unterweisung im Tonsatz (1937-1940) was intended to be a textbook for beginners in the field of musical composition. It was closely related to the pedagogical quests of Paul Hindemith during his work as a professor at the Berliner Hochschule für Musik. In this work, the composer attempts to lay the foundations of a new harmonic system that would meet needs of the modern musical language. Inspired by the 17th century treatise Harmonices mundi of the German mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler who developed a theory based on the belief that one single law governs the universe, the composer arrives at the idea of building a harmonic system on the overtone series. As a philosopher and a visionary, Paul Hindemith comes in an original way to concrete, pragmatic solutions of the posed musical problems. In the Introductory to Unterweisung im Tonsatz the author presents his arguments concerning the need of a strong theoretical foundation for the training of students in composition. Reconsidering the rules in the 20th century musical art was motivated by the “dialectic of a total freedom”. Hindemith embarks on a search for fundamental elements of the being and creates his tonal system on the basis of an acoustic principle. Departing from the “core” of the tone, he builds up a hierarchy on strictly defined rules that would make possible to analyze each connection of tones, intervals or chords. Hindemith points out that the meaning of his musical material will never be clear even to the “musicianbeliever” unless he continually returns to the core of the tone trying to understand its electronic flux – the overtones in their proportional relations. The present study explores Paul Hindemith’s system not in the context of all compositional systems that emerge during the 20th century, but as one of the most important components of his overall musical and philosophical conception. An argument for such a view derives from his many-sided activities of an artist, thinker and humanist, marked by a constant aspiration towards rationality, order and universality.

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