Analysis And Application Of The Musical Composition Theories Of Paul Hindemith

Paul Hindemith is an outstanding composer, musical educator and theoretician in the twentieth century. As a musical theoretician, he created a set of comprehensive and valuable theories for musical techniques and application. His masterpiece, The Craft of Musical Composition, is among the listing of excellent musical works in the twentieth century. The theories of Paul Hindemith can be classified into two types: practicability and modernity. His theories for musical composition consist of the principles for tonal material organization, application of harmony, the arrangement of tonality as well as analysis of works. However, there have few illustrations about the applications of his theories, in the original works of Hindemith and in the translations and papers related to his theories. Therefore, more research should be done in this aspect.Xiaolin Tan, a Chinese composer (1911-1948), had been a student of Paul Hindemith for 4 years when he studied away in US. So he gained great insights into Hindemith's composing theories. Tan offered careful supervision for his students as to Hindemith's chord theories and applying those theories to composition when he was an instructor in Shanghai Conservatory Simply speaking, the theory of Hindemith is to compose music on the basis of a chromatic scale, putting chord and rhythm above the chromatic scale. Hindemith's theories go through the limitation of heptachord, establishing a new method for chord classification which includes all possible chords. Hindemith proposed a series of theories and principles for combining chords. Hindemith's theories, as scientific systems based on the natural features of tones, can be applied to musical works of all times and all styles. As far as Hindemith's theories are concerned, there are a lot of introductions and comments from various aspects.This paper is made up of four parts: introduction, features of Hindemith's musical composition theories, practice of his theories and conclusion. The first part is mainly concerned with the introduction of Paul Hindemith, the practicability and modernity of his theories, and the application of his theories to practice. The second part deals with the chord composition, varieties and specialty, chord classification, evaluation, connection and compensation based on their physical properties, the principle for introduction tone, the concepts of tonality and the like. The third part is about the applications of his theories, from the perspective of bipartite- frame and chord connotation, the design and classification of chord undulation, the selection of chord and so forth. The forth part draws a conclusion. We did an initial research in this article on how to use Hindemith's theory in our actual composition from"bipartite frame"composition, design of"harmonic undulation"and the selection chords.