Further Development of Music Theory
Hindemith reveals a decisive new turning point in his musical thinking in the lectures he gave from 1955 onwards, as well as in the German version of his musical poetics ‹A Composer's World.› The concept of «overall tonality» as the epitome of all conceivable forms of tonal relationships occupies the centre of his thought; of these, only one definite type of tonality can be effective in individual works as a «selected tonality.» This special kind of tonality, as a «selected tonality,» must always first be incorporated into the works and compositionally realised; it is the result of, and no longer the prerequisite for expedient compositional work.
In no way does Hindemith abandon his conviction that music knows phenomena such as the differing value of intervals present in nature and valid under all conditions. But he now leaves open the effect that such phenomena are to make in a work. They can either openly come to the fore or be suppressed, but they must be legitimated by the character of the work to be written. According to this conception, atonality only appears as a special form of tonality favouring the most complicated forms of tonal relationships.
However, the music-theoretical expansion of his deliberations was accompanied by an increasing polemic against the New Music of that time. Hindemith accused it of recklessly irresponsible, blindly progressive thinking borrowed from science that he, already in 1995, regarded as being propelled into an ecological catastrophe. He criticised the New Music of the 1950s as follows: «Of course new horizons have been opened up, but the expanses that one beholds are like those of endless seas and deserts of sand, where it is impossible for mankind to settle.»