- German composer. After his father's death in 1915, he brought money home to the family by playing in taverns and cinemas. He also performed as a solo violist or in various chamber music ensembles, organized music festivals in Donaueschingen and Baden-Baden (1923-1929), taught at the Hochschule für Musik, Berlin (1927-1938), Yale University (1940-1953) and Zürich University (1951-1956), and in 1953 began a new career as orchestral conductor. Emigrated to the USA in 1940 and became a US Citizen in 1946.
- Biography in: "American National Biography". Supplement 1, pp. 271-272. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002.
- Although he refused to move back to Germany after World War II, a mortally ill Hindemith returned to his hometown of Frankfurt to die in December 1963.
- Considered the greatest German composer of his generation.
- He founded the Amar Quartet in 1921, touring extensively in Europe.
- Most of Hindemith's compositions are anchored by a foundational tone, and use musical forms and counterpoint and cadences typical of the Baroque and Classical traditions. His harmonic language is more modern, freely using all 12 notes of the chromatic scale within his tonal framework, as detailed in his three-volume treatise, The Craft of Musical Composition.
- As a composer, he became a major advocate of the Neue Sachlichkeit (New Objectivity) style of music in the 1920s, with compositions such as Kammermusik, including works with viola and viola d'amore as solo instruments in a neo-Bachian spirit.
- Hindemith was a German and American composer, music theorist, teacher, violist and conductor.
- Hindemith and his wife emigrated to Switzerland and the United States ahead of World War II, after worsening difficulties with the Nazi German regime. In his later years, he conducted and recorded much of his own music.
- An annual festival of Hindemith's music has been held at William Paterson University in Wayne, New Jersey, from 2003 through at least 2017. It features student, staff, and professional musicians performing a range of Hindemith's works.
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