A composer who lived and breathed everyday tones

St Petersburg's concert halls are currently ringing with humble but profound harmony as they observe the centenary of German composer Paul Hindemith, who took American citizenship after World War II before spending his last years in Switzerland.

On Friday, December 8, in the Great Hall of the Philharmonia, German conductor Georg Albrecht will conduct Hindemith's Viola Concerto, opus #48 (with soloist Andrei Dogadin), his Symphony Die Harmonie Der Welt, and Mozart's Symphony No 34. The program repeats on Saturday, with the Grieg Piano Concerto substituting for the Viola Concerto.

Hindemith was an extremely prolific composer; it was said that he could write a piece of music as easily as another man might write a letter. He wrote the final movement of a Solo Violin Sonata on the train between Bremen and Frankfurt. While in England to perform the premiere of William Walton's Viola Concerto, Hindemith learned of the death of George V. The next day he wrote the Trauermusik for viola and string orchestra, which was premiered the day following.

Widely regarded as the most accomplished and versatile performer-composer of his time, Hindemith daily drew breath in an environment of musical activity, and felt strongly that the composition of music must be based on the acoustic nature of sound. For Hindemith, then, the systematic atonality of Schoenberg's twelve-tone system was unnatural and cerebral. "Music," Hindemith wrote, "as long as it exists, will take its departure from the major triad and return to it."

Since his death in 1963 Hindemith has been unjustly slighted by even the musical world. His was not a particularly colorful personality, nor did he move in the glamorous circles that Stravinsky did. And his music did not seek to inspire either the controversy or intellectual esteem alternately enjoyed by the music of Schoenberg.

Hindemith was a kind of musical craftsman who, after a period of stylistic assimilation, developed a vision of what the role of music should be, and wrote music to fulfil that role.

Although himself a formidable pianist and violinist, he wrote a great deal of music for performance by talented amateurs. Almost alone among his contemporary composers, Hindemith was alarmed by the widening gulf between the modern composer and the public. He reasoned that writing new music for the non-professional music-maker was the most sensible way of bridging the gap.

During World War I, Hindemith served in a regimental band near the front; his commanding officer had him form a string quartet for private concerts. Once they played the Debussy string quartet. For some years Debussy proudly added Musicien Francais to his signature; his music was an important stage in the liberation of French music from the German artistic domination of the 19th century.

During the performance of the Debussy, news reached the soldiers of Debussy's death; they stopped playing, unable to finish the piece. "We realized for the first time," Hindemith wrote, "that music is more than style, technique and the expression of personal feelings. Music stretched beyond political boundaries, national hatreds and the horrors of war. I have never understood so clearly as then what direction music must take."

More than any of his contemporaries, Hindemith took great pains that the music he wrote should be playable. He set out to learn to play each instrument of the orchestra competently; there was a period when he would not write a passage for any instrument, unless he could play that instrument.

From the violin, Hindemith switched to that unsung member of the string family, the viola, for which instrument he wrote no fewer than three concerti. He also performed on a Baroque form of the instrument, the viola d'amore, and was among the first to expound the notion of performing early music on original instruments and in accordance with the performance practice of its time.

Hindemith's sense of tonality is highly sophisticated and adventurous, but his is a music which has not ruled the major triad out as somehow artistically unsuitable.

Hindemith's last major work was the opera Die Harmonie Der Welt (The Harmony of the World) in 1957, which dramatizes the attempts of the Renaissance astronomer Johannes Kepler to find the "music of the spheres." The symphony of the same name comprises three movements of music adapted from scenes from the opera.

Recognizing music as a component of our physical and spiritual environment, Hindemith sought to write music that was at once artistically honest, as well as true to this natural environment. In this view of music, the amateur is not a technical inconvenience, but a partner.

"The performing amateur who seriously concerns himself with musical matters is quite as important a member of our musical life as the professional," Hindemith wrote in 1930. And 22 years later, in the book "A Composer's World": "It is not impossible that out of a tremendous movement of amateur community music a peace movement could spread over the world ... People who make music together cannot be enemies, at least not while the music lasts."