Klaviermusik Op. 37, Part 2, No. 12 (Lustiges Stück)

Instrumentation

Collections

Musical Terms (7)

• Gebrauchsmusik German
  Utility music or \"music for use.\" A tendency — more a critic's label than a formal movement — associated with Hindemith and other Weimar-era composers who wrote functional music for specific practical, educational, or amateur purposes: school music, amateur ensembles, radio, mechanical instruments. Hindemith himself eventually rejected the term, but it usefully identifies the democratic impulse behind much of his pedagogical output (Klaviermusik Op. 37, Wir bauen eine Stadt, etc.).
  When performing Gebrauchsmusik works, bring craft and care without imposing concert-hall solemnity. These pieces are meant to be useful — musical, clear, and accessible — not elevated into something they were not designed to be.
• mässig German
  Moderate; restrained. Appears frequently in Hindemith's tempo markings — \"mässig bewegt\" (moderately moving), \"mässig schnell\" (moderately fast) — indicating a tempo that is neither slow nor rushed. The qualifier \"mässig\" signals that drive and momentum should be contained rather than projected, consistent with Hindemith's general aesthetic of formal discipline over Romantic abandon.
  \"Mässig\" is a character as much as a tempo: measured, controlled, purposeful. Avoid making mässig passages merely neutral or background — they carry the same compositional weight as faster or slower sections.
• Neue Sachlichkeit German
  New Objectivity. The aesthetic movement that emerged in Weimar Germany in the early 1920s as a reaction against the excesses of Expressionism. In music, it prized clarity, irony, economy of means, and references to popular dance forms (jazz, ragtime, foxtrot), deliberately replacing Romantic sentiment with cool precision. Hindemith's Suite \"1922\" is its defining piano document.
  Approach Neue Sachlichkeit music with intellectual clarity and rhythmic precision rather than expressive warmth. The irony is structural, not theatrical — underplay it rather than oversell it. When Hindemith provides satirical performance instructions (e.g. \"disregard what you have learned at school\"), follow the underlying rhythmic character, not a random caricature.
• Sehr lebhaft German
  Very lively. A recurring marking in Hindemith's three piano sonatas — the second movement of Sonata No. 3 and a movement in Sonata No. 1 — indicating the most propulsive, scherzo-like energy in each work. In the context of the 1936 sonatas, \"sehr lebhaft\" movements draw on both Baroque gigue energy and jazz-inflected rhythmic drive.
  In Sehr lebhaft movements, the tempo must be genuinely fast — not \"lively with safety margins.\" The character is athletic, not frantic. Maintain articulatory clarity at full speed; Hindemith's counterpoint must remain audible even at the extremes.
• Stramm German
  Strictly in time; crisp. Hindemith's marking for the first movement (Marsch) of Suite \"1922\" — \"Stramm. Energisch\" — specifies both a rigid metric character and an emphatic, aggressive energy distinct from the lyrical suppleness of later movements.
  In movements marked stramm, the pulse must be absolute. No rubato, no expressive broadening. The rigidity is the expression.
• tonality (Hindemith) English
  Hindemith's theory of tonality, elaborated in The Craft of Musical Composition (1937), holds that all twelve tones of the chromatic scale relate to a single central pitch (the tonic) according to a natural hierarchy derived from the overtone series. In contrast to functional major-minor tonality, this system has no key signature and no modulation in the traditional sense, but every passage has a clearly audible tonal centre that the ear can identify. Ludus Tonalis is the complete practical demonstration of this theory.
  Do not try to hear Hindemith through a tonal (functional harmony) or atonal lens simultaneously. Find the tonal centre of each passage — Hindemith places it clearly, usually in the bass — and let the voice-leading move toward and away from it. Harmonic tension arises from the distance of intervals from the tonal centre, not from dominant-tonic syntax.
• Übung German
  Exercise; study. Hindemith's title for the first part of Klaviermusik Op. 37 — \"Übung in drei Stücken\" (Exercise in Three Pieces) — invokes the pedagogical tradition of the étude while indicating that compositional problem-solving (not merely technical display) is the primary concern.
  Identify the specific compositional problem each Übung is working through — texture, voice independence, motivic development. Understanding the pedagogical purpose illuminates the expressive character.