Top 10 Quotes & Sayings by Paul Hindemith

Explore popular quotes and sayings by a German musician Paul Hindemith.
Last updated on April 14, 2025.
Paul Hindemith

Paul Hindemith was a German composer, music theorist, teacher, violist and conductor. He founded the Amar Quartet in 1921, touring extensively in Europe. As a composer, he became a major advocate of the Neue Sachlichkeit 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. Other notable compositions include his song cycle Das Marienleben (1923), Der Schwanendreher for viola and orchestra (1935), the opera Mathis der Maler (1938), the Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber (1943), and the oratorio When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd, a requiem based on Walt Whitman's poem (1946).

People who make music together cannot be enemies, at least while the music lasts.
There are only two things worth aiming for, good music and a clean conscience.
There are only twelve tones and they need to be treated carefully. — © Paul Hindemith
There are only twelve tones and they need to be treated carefully.
My God, how can anyone ever be a master of music?
Tonality is a natural force, like gravity.
Music, as long as it exists, will always take its departure from the major triad and return to it. The musician cannot escape it any more than the painter his primary colors or the architect his three dimensions.
Music is meaningless noise unless it touches a receiving mind.
Your task it is, amid confusion, rush, and noise, to grasp the lasting, calm and meaningful, and finding it anew, to hold and treasure it.
Our spirit of life is not identical with that of our ancestors, and therefore their music, even if restored with utter technical perfections, can never have to us precisely the same meaning it had for them. We cannot tear down the barricade that separates the present world from things and deeds past.
The reactions music evokes are not feelings, but they are the images, memories of feelings.
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