Paul Hindemith
“Hindemith's Musik ist poo-poo!!”
“Hindemith? But I'm Paul Hindemith. What do you mean I'm not Paul Hindemith?!”
“Oh the humanity!”
Paul Led Zeppelinburg "LZ-129" Hindemith (November 16 1895 – May 6 1937/December 28, 1963) was an awful composer, a terrible violinist, an even worse violist, and a conductor whose style merely consisted of randomly flailing and waving his arms about and insulting musicians who dared to object. Due to a series of misprints on German military documents and election ballots, he served as President of Germany from 1925 to 1934 and a general in World War I. He was also an avid Nazi-supporter who appointed Adolf Hitler chancellor in 1933 and faked dead in 1934 because he felt Hitler was a strong, moral leader destined to make history. But most importantly to modern history, he was a zeppelin and the genocidal mastermind of the Harmonic Holocaust. Dog dip.
Life[edit]
Born in some unimportant German town nobody's ever heard of or cares about, Hindemith was taught the violin as a child. He entered the Hochsche Konservatorium in Frankfurt, Maine where he studied conducting, composition, and violin under Arnold Mendelssohn and Bernhard Sekles. He soon dropped out of the conservatory, however, due to the fact he failed Harmony 101 and Basic Composition 101, though he aced How-to-Write-Loud-and-Obnoxious-Music. And despite all the wonderful teaching and the early start, he managed to suck at playing violin.
He played second violin in the Rebner String Quartet (God knows how he managed to get that position) in 1921, and later the viola. In 1929, after he was kicked out from the string quartet for playing so horribly, he founded the Amar Quartet and extensively toured Europe, frightening and shocking people with his total inability to play in tune. He led the Frankfurter Opera orchestra from 1915 until 1923, when it went bankrupt.
In 1922, some of Hindemith's pieces were heard in the International Society for Contemporary Music festival at Salzburg, which first brought him to the attention of an international audience, mostly due to the horror stories the festival's survivors told. The following year, he began to work as an organizer of the Donaueschingen Festival, where he programmed works by several avant-garde composers, including Anton Webern and Arnold Schoenberg. The festival failed, as only twelve were in attendance. From 1927, he taught composition at the Berliner Hochschule für Musik in Berlin until he was fired after he was found to have no knowledge of the subject he taught. Towards the end of the 1930s, Hindemith made several tours in America as a viola and viola d'amore (a viola that sounds more awful than a normal one) soloist until he was officially exiled in 1939 (despite the fact he was already dead). In the 1940s, he tried to sneak back into the United States, but he was deported to Zürich, Switzerland.
World War I and Political Career[edit]
Because of a bad mixup, Hindemith served as one of Germany's top generals in World War I. He supported unrestricted submarine warfare, which pissed off Woodrow Wilson enough to declare war in April of 1917. Hindemith, had he had at least basic military instruction, might have been able to defeat France, Belgium, Serbia, Russia, Italy, Great Britain, and the United States. But he, knowing nothing at all about combat strategies, did quite the opposite. Because of Hindemith's lack of experience and total incompetence, Germany managed to lose the war in 1918. Hindemith, though, diverted the blame for defeat to Kaiser Wilhelm II, who was almost immediately overthrown and exiled. This dodge secured Hindemith public office in the Weimar Republic.
In 1925, Hindemith was elected President of Germany. Soon after, the Great Depression hit, turning a large portion of the population of Germany jobless and emo, and greatly increasing inflation in Germany until the deustchmark was worth about as much as a recently discovered Hindemith composition (approximately nothing). In the next election, the Nazis won almost every seat of parliament by a landslide, while Hindemith remained in office. Because of public pressure, he appointed Adolf Hitler chancellor in 1933. Just a year later, Hindemith, completely confident in Hitler's superior governing skills, faked his own death in order .
This decision would ultimately become looked upon as one of the greatest things to ever happen in the Third Reich, while everywhere else, it would ultimately be one of the many reasons why Hindemith sucks.
Nazism[edit]
When the Nazis came to power in Germany, Paul Hindemith began to attend their rallies where he joyfully supported the new leaders. These rallies inspired Hindemith to organize a series of concerts officially dedicated to the Nazi Party that became known as Überdeutschekonzerten. These Überdeutschekonzerten were created with the goal to exceed other countries around the world and assert the superiority of German orchestra concerts.
On December 6, 1934, Joseph Goebbels publicly called Hindemith an "atonal noisemaker", the highest praise that Hindemith's music had ever received. In the same statement Goebbels also suggested to Heinrich Himmler that Hindemith's music be played nonstop in concentration camps but Himmler never implemented the idea because he thought it was too cruel. This was one of the many signs of favor in which the Nazi leaders viewed him. Hindemith returned these signs of affection when he swore an oath of loyalty to Hitler and even became a member of the Reich Music Chamber. When Hindemith was commissioned to write music for a Luftwaffe event he was overjoyed but soon became depressed because his piece didn't show enough love for the Nazis. The piece was never finished, not even for the Luftwaffe event, causing Hindemith to become ashamed of himself. Soon after, he discovered his wife was Jewish and that he had emigrated to Switzerland.
Death[edit]
In 1935, Hindemith volunteered to be trained as an elite transporter of people. He had always been a great fan of transportation, as he was an avid collector of miniature train sets. After his training finished in 1936, he went into service transporting people. On May 3, 1937, he was assigned to fill himself with 200,000 cubic meters of hydrogen and fly across the Atlantic Ocean while carrying a car full of 36 passengers and 61 crew members beneath him. He performed the tasks easily enough, but on May 6 as he was docking over Lakewurst, New Jersey, Hindemith suddenly exploded midair and came crashing to the ground. Although most of the people he was carrying survived, Hindemith and thirty-six others did not. CITATION NEEDED
Controversy[edit]
Although Hindemith's death was captured on film, many argue that Hindemith did not die on May 6, 1937, but on December 28, 1963. Arguments in support of this include declaring the photographs and films of the incident were forged to include Hindemith, while, in fact, the original footage was of a zeppelin, or perhaps the very fat German President Paul von Hindenburg, though no evidence can support this. Also argued is that Paul Hindemith was incapable of filling himself with 200,000 cubic meters of hydrogen gas, carrying a car full of 36 passengers and 61 crew members, weighing 112 tons, or even flying across the Atlantic while performing all the above, while Paul von Hindenburg was, and even already weighed several tons himself. Hindenburg himself was also, like Hindemith, a trained transporter and flew as a zeppelin quite often.
Still, it officially remains that Paul Hindemith perished in the disaster.
Sightings[edit]
After his death, Paul Hindemith was frequently reported to have been sighted in Switzerland from 1938 - 1939 and the United States in the 1940s. Papers were even filed to make him a naturalized citizen, which were approved by a judge, Wilhelm Furtwängler, in 1946 after he had lunch with the deceased. In the time he was sighted in the U.S., Hindemith supposedly taught at Yale University, and gave a series of lectures on German poetry at Harvard, which he compiled and published in the book A Nazi World. in 1952. In 1962, Hindemith was given the Balzan Prize, which he gladly accepted despite being dead.
The Harmonic Holocaust[edit]
In the days following his death, the music community rejoiced and celebrated that he could no longer terrorize concertgoers around the world. They soon realized, though, that they were gravely mistaken.
Shortly after his death, Hindemith returned and toured with many orchestras and premiered numerous compositions he wrote, showing that even from the grave, he would relentlessly attack and destroy every law of music. Inspired by Adolf Hitler's ideas, Hindemith spent his posthumous career systematically murdering, destroying, and raping the laws of music in the period now known as the Harmonic Holocaust. He would murder harmonies in sickening, gruesome ways, beating and smashing pianos that played in tune, sending chords to be gassed, and often burning sheet music alive. This would ultimately become Hindemith's legacy.
In the late 1930s, Hindemith attempted to spread the idea of tonal genocide in The Craft of Musical Composition, a pro-dissonance propaganda book that even listed which intervals were dissonant and which were not. Fortunately, this book was discontinued in 1960. In 1943, Hindemith horrified audiences worldwide with his piece, Symphonic Metamorphoses of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber, which kidnapped Carl Maria von Weber's melodies and murdered them, while turning others into cockroaches. More of his genocidal intentions were clearly shown in 1951 at the premier of his opera Die Harmonie der Welt (literally meaning "Death to Harmonies of the World") in which Hindemith attempted to murder the common musical harmonies by butchering them.
His persecution of all consonance did not end until 1963, when on November 24 (twelve days after the premier of his final act of harmonic genocide called Mess), Hindemith's pancreas, suddenly becoming aware of the horrors their owner had committed, rebelled against the rest of Hindemith's body and began to inflame. A month later, on December 28, as Hindemith was flying over Lakewurst, New Jersey, his pancreas swelled up so much they a sploded into flames, killing him a second time, along with thirty-six of the passengers aboard him. The mass murderer of harmonies was no more.
The famous footage of the tyrant's final death can be seen here. It should be noted that as Hindemith aged, he began to resemble more and more a giant blimp with the name "Hindenburg" tattooed on his side because of extremely serious mental illness.
Music[edit]
Hindemith's music, as has been said before, was extremely horrible. In an attempt to hide his lack of any talent, Hindemith pioneered gebrauchsmusik with numerous compositions intended for horrible musicians like himself. This, of course, placed the blame for the awful music on the musicians instead of Hindemith, successfully creating a scapegoat for his faults.
As his life and various mental illnesses (notably a severe case of Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterparteitis) progressed, his compositions grew more repulsive and dissonant to the point where even Arnold Schoenberg was extremely displeased with such atrocities. This progression split his life into four distinctly different periods. The first, or awful period of his youth, which was characterized mostly by works for solo viola and works for young musicians. The second, or indecent period of his adolescent years which produced sexually-charged works such as Lewdus Penalis and Skank de Susanna. The third, or very shitty period lasted through his adult years when his strain of Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterparteitis began to affect his sanity and primarily consisted of the use of dissonance and out-of-tune instruments. In addition, he also wrote songs filled with Nazi propaganda, such as the infamous Ich liebe Hitler. The fourth and most infamous genocidal period began when Hindemith's case of Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterparteitis took total control over his brain and lasted until his death from Sudden Exploding Pancreas Syndrome. It was in this final period that the Harmonic Holocaust was carried out with the most horrifying pieces ever written.
It is often claimed that Hindemith wrote a sonata for every instrument. This is entirely true. Hindemith's Sonata for every instrument is perhaps one of his best known works, in which a large orchestra of every, that's right, every instrument ever conceived is instructed to play the same part! Not at the same tempo or in the same key of course.
Abominations[edit]
Thus follows a list of Paul Hindemith's compositions that were considered to be him at his absolute worst. It is highly advised to never, ever seek out recordings of these pieces because of the extreme effects the compositions have on the human mind and body. In fact, strong caution must be taken while even simply reading this list, as even the names can conjure up horrible images and sounds.
Terrifying Operas[edit]
- Skank de Susanna
- Cadillac
- New Cadillac: Now With More Dissonance!
Awful Works Which Are Passed Off As Vaguely Being Concerti[edit]
- Concerto for Violin and Orchestra
- Concerto for Orchestra and Orchestra
- Phylharmohic Concerto (Variations for Orchestra by a Composer Who is Incapable of Spelling a Simple Word Like "Philharmonic" Correctly)
- Concerto for Annoying, Screeching Clarinetist Who Has Not Played In Several Decades
- Concerto for Male Sex Organ
- Concerto for Trumpet and Bassoon
- Concerto for Viola, Contrabasson, Awfulkleid, and Any Other Instrument That Doesn't Sound Quite Right
- Der Schwanendreher for viola and deaf string orchestra
Symphonic Horrors[edit]
- Symphonic Metamorphoses of Themes Plagiarized from Carl Maria von Weber
- Symphony in H-double-flat-melodic-minor for concert band, fog-horn and banjo
- Little Symphony
- Slightly-Larger-Than-Small-But-Not-Quite-Medium Symphony
- Übersymphony in Hitler Major (dedicated to the Nazi Party)
- Die Harmonie der Welt Symphony ("Death to Harmonies of the World")
- Concert Music for String and Brass Instruments (To Be Played By Deceased Members of The Boston Symphony Orchestra)
- Mathis der Mahler Symphony for orchestra and Gustav Mahler
- Meditation for Viola and Gas Chamber Orcherstra
Violations of Sonatas[edit]
Note: The list is too long for anyone to possibly read within their lifetime. But here it is anyway.
- Horn Sonata for horn and piano
- Horn Sonata for instrument which is, in fact, a member of the tuba family, not a horn
Deadly Chorales[edit]
- When Lilacs Last in Berlin Bloom'd (Requiem for Hitler's death)
- Lieder nach Texten von Friedrich Nietzsche for Aryan choir (celebrating the dream of the Übermensch)
- Liederhosen
- Das Hitlerleben
Miscellaneous (But Dreadful) Obsessions with Naughty Bits[edit]
- Lewdus Penalis
- Trousermusik for King George V's pants
- Wind Sex Tent for flute, oboe, clarinet, bass clarinet, bassoon, horn, and trumpet
- Fün Sticke ("Fun Stick")
- Acht Stücke für Flöte allein ("Ach! It's stuck in your flute!")
- Seven Trios for Trousertonium for three Trousertoniums, instruments vaguely resembling a theremin mixed with a 60s computer mainframe and a hurdy-gurdy.
See also[edit]
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| Horrible Modern Composers |
| Igor Stravinsky | Paul Hindemith | Sergei Prokofiev | Anton Webern | Arnold Schoenberg | Béla Bartók | John Cage | Charles Ives | Philip Glass | Steve Reich |