„He was a very tough teacher.“
As a teacher of composition, Hindemith was convinced that creative talent could only lead to compositional mastery in combination with the complete mastery of all technical means. He also planned his compositional instruction in accordance with this maxim. In 1940 he reported to his wife on a holiday course at Tanglewood, in the USA: “I am of course a very ‘famous’ teacher here and the pupils have already spread the rumour about everything unexpected that I intend to do with them. […] In the first lessons there was some resistance, some of it due to the unusual work that I require, some of it because of the absolute lack of esteem that I showed for the earlier scores of my patients. Through suitable treatment, however, even the stubborn ones amongst them softened, and after I had completely worn them down with the often tried-and-true means of a three-hour strict contrapuntal exercise on the blackboard, they are now all exceptionally well-behaved. […] My boys were quite horrified when they suddenly saw themselves forced to sing what they wrote, and even more so when they had to attend instrumental instruction. The one most surprised was my professional colleague Copland, who wants to do things completely differently with his six composers and perform their stuff, and always talks about finished composers instead of considering them thoroughly bad and incompetent, as I consider mine; I want to provide them with an appropriate cure. […] This all sounds a bit funny when one tells it like that, but it is absolutely necessary when one wants to combat the more than scandalous sloppiness and ignorance in the fields of composition and music theory in this country.”
Many composition pupils agreed that Hindemith’s teaching was particularly strict. A similar statement was made by the recently deceased American composer Peter Ré (1919-2016), one of Hindemith’s numerous pupils at Yale University in New Haven, in an interview recorded in 2014.