Learning Paul Hindemith’s Unaccompanied Sonata for Viola,

Opus 25 #1, 1922. 1st Movement

I had just finished performing a set of repertoire and was thinking of new goals. My teacher and I were discussing new pieces and he mentioned the Hindemith Sonata for Viola Opus 25 #1. I not heard of this particular sonata and was curious to find out more. My teacher said it was a good piece for auditions, and mentioned his success with the work for his auditions when he was young. He had an old videotape of him performing the piece for his graduate school auditions when he was my age. This was highly motivating as I was watching the process of this master teacher becoming the master.

When starting on a new work, I usually try to listen to a recording to get a point of reference. Then comes the hard and laborious stage where I drill small parts and start putting the pieces together. My favorite stage of the learning process is the personal interpretation I need to bring to the work. This is where I apply my own visual story or at least an emotional tone. After I figure out what I want to convey to the audience and to myself, I move on to the “polishing” part of the process. I drill any fragments of the work that feel insecure, and try to smooth the technical glitches out. I check rhythm, intonation, dynamics and I practice perform. I perform all or part of my program for small groups before the performance date to see how I’m doing and to check their response to my music.

My first reaction to Hindemith’s sonata was not what I had hoped. The piece is very dissonant and not pretty, it has a brutal, raw, unrefined texture. When I began practicing this violent piece I was careless with my intonation and technique, in part because of the seemingly harsh dissonances—I mean it sounded so nasty, how could anyone tell if it was out of tune or not? I had heard other players perform different Hindemith viola sonatas and I was not fond of those performances. I had a hard time hearing if I was in tune, and I was not inspired. Inspiration comes to me when I can hear the piece I want to play in my head the way I want to play it. Then I work towards getting that performance in my fingers and out of the instrument. I want to own the performance and my reading of the work. Even when I heard Hindemith played well, my prior impressions stayed with me and I didn't like the piece. I learned it and gave a mediocre performance. I didn't have a good understanding of the work and the underlying effects the composer was working for. The turning point for me was when my teacher made me pay very close attention to exact intonation and take the time to stop and look into each note and phrase.

This opened a whole new perspective on the work for me. My original negative opinion of the piece had affected my approach and my motivation to learn it. I had tagged it as ugly and I didn’t hear a performance in my head that I wanted to own. But my teacher instructed me to go home and get it in tune. I did. I gave it my full, attentive, meticulous ear. Then, looking into the piece I saw a hidden natural organic quality that I had not seen before. And I began to like it. After taking the time to correct my pitches and understand the phrase structure, the work transformed itself from a violent hacking mess to a wonderful piece of music that feels purely organic and natural to me. To me this piece is like a dirty root you pull out of the ground, and I’m touching the soil clinging to the root hairs with my fingers. It’s not “nice.” It isn’t pretty like a flower. It doesn’t please the senses like a piece of velvet, an heirloom rose or a cup of hot chocolate. But it is beautiful in its own way as a vital, living element of life. Nature is harmonious; it just doesn’t always look that way. That is the way Hindemith sounds to me; full of these raw elements, and full of life. I hear these dissonant harmonies as music in a natural state.

When I listen to this piece I see one person-- and there are two voices in that one person’s head, like in a cartoon where one voice is a devil and the other is an angel. These two characters are: a total controlling egomaniac and the second is a questioning, temperate voice, like a conscience. This second voice sweetly contrasts with the rough, brutal, grating, and demanding primary voice expressed in the opening 3 note motive. The rough voice is a recurring theme always answered by the contemplative conscience. These contrasting, arguing voices continue their argument, a sort of call and response, to the end of the first movement. Toward the end they begin to speak simultaneously, in a duet that sounds almost like a chase. The tone of these individual voices start to sound the same toward the end of the movement. Again, the two voices in one head, an internal conflict in a single brain. The raw materials are these natural feeling dissonant sounds that heighten the tension of the two arguing voices. They feel like some sort of primal emotions with a sound that comes right out of the earth- like the dirt covered root.

Hindemith had an interesting style; he rigidly used formal structure and form from the Baroque period, but filled these forms with modern sounds and ideas from the modern Machine Age. He was a contemporary of composers like George Gershwin and visual artists like Wassily Kandinsky and Pablo Picasso. As the jazz artists were making new chords, Hindemith was using the same harmonic ideas—but as a spare, minimal intervals. Like Kandinsky, he stripped the music down to its most basic abstract elements. The painter still worked on a rectangular canvas, just as the old Masters had, but what was in that rectangle was a new composition of rhythm, color, line. This is what Hindemith was doing. Maintaining the formal elements of form but filling it with new ideas for a fragmented world where all the formal elements must fall into a new order.

This sonata by Hindemith has been an intense learning experience for me. It was at first difficult to listen to, let alone play and play well. I have had to work through my own prejudices and preconceptions to find something to like. When I found a new way of hearing it and thinking about it everything changed. I found my own voice, threw out my misconceptions and I have found much to love and enjoy emotionally, structurally and harmonically.