In the second half of the twentieth century the music of Paul Hindemith was considered too conservative by composers of ‘new music’ and yet remained too modern for many devotees of the classical tonal tradition. Perhaps as a result of this, the decades after Hindemith's death in 1963 saw comparatively few detailed academic studies of a composer who had commanded a wide international following during his lifetime, particularly during his years teaching at the Berlin Hochschule für Musik and the Yale School of Music. Perhaps two of the main reasons for the neglect of Hindemith's music in academic discourse are the diverse locations and languages of his primary material. He was an incredibly prolific musician – as performer, composer, conductor, and teacher – and his legacy therefore intersects a variety of fields. The number of geographical locations and institutions in which he worked – which also included Frankfurt (where he lived from the age of ten and died in 1963), Ankara, and Zürich – means that his materials are dispersed in different archives throughout the world. Add to this the unavailability of many essential sources in the English language – not only writings by Hindemith himself, but articles about him in publications such as Zeitschrift für Musik, Die Musik, and Melos, all of which contain essential information pertaining to his music, his theories, and their reception.

Stephen Luttmann's Research and Information Guide (henceforth HRIG) illustrates trends in Hindemith scholarship, widens access to his materials, and highlights areas for future work. It provides useful leads to articles that would otherwise be impossible for non-German readers to unearth, in addition to insightful summaries, which can help the reader to decide if an article in a foreign language is worth pursuing. (For reasons of space these summaries are not offered for dissertations.) The text is organized into twenty-one chapters that range from ‘Life-and-Works Studies’ to ‘Aspects of the Hindemith Reception’. It is followed by two appendices: a list of Hindemith's works and an inventory of his recorded performances. This latter appendix is of particular interest to performance practice research, as it lists several recorded performances by Hindemith's Yale Collegium Musicum, including Johann Sebastian Bach's Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied, BWV225, and Giovanni Gabrieli's Nunc dimittis and Virtute magna from Sacrae Symphoniae (1597).

The first edition of HRIG included research material dated before the middle of 2003, while the second edition includes newer material up until late 2007. Is there a strong reason if one already owns the first edition to purchase the second, for the sake of four further years of scholarship? The first edition contained 1189 citations, in addition to various appendices such as work lists. The new edition has deleted 140 entries and added 204, creating a net increase of 64. The selection criteria have been subtly altered to account for this change in content, and include two new distinctions: item 9, ‘Items concerned primarily with the use of Hindemith's works in the elementary or secondary music curriculum have been included only when they offer particular musicological insights, incorporate obscure source material, or possess similar virtues,’ and item 7, ‘Only research written in or translated into Germanic and Romance languages has been included.’ This second clause unfortunately marginalizes evidence of the emerging interest in Hindemith's music and music theory on the part of a global audience. That the Hindemith Institute in Frankfurt holds a Japanese translation of the Unterweisung, for example, raises interesting questions about the role and dissemination of Hindemith's pedagogical and theoretical texts in Japan, and the impact they might have had on performers and composers at university and conservatoire level.

As a proportion of the overall volume, the difference between the two editions is small, though the new entries include items of potential interest, such as Joel Haney's 2006 doctoral dissertation and the personal website of Jörg Hindemith, a Thuringian pop singer who has claimed to be related to Paul Hindemith (57).Footnote ¹ There are also further entries from the ongoing Hindemith-Jahrbuch and Hindemith Forum, including Giselher Schubert's edition of the correspondence between Hindemith and Karin Thienemann.Footnote ² Regarding the items deleted from the second edition, it is surprising that ‘Hindemith as Violinist’ has been removed from the chapter on Hindemith the performer. Furthermore, it is a pity that Allen Forte's Contemporary Tone Structures Footnote ³ does not have a place, given that it contains one of the seminal analyses of a fugue from Hindemith's Ludus Tonalis. This work influenced both the thinking behind his subsequent The Structure of Atonal Music and the work of his student David Neumeyer, whose own doctoral dissertation was highly dependent on Forte's evolving theories.Footnote ⁴ The selection criteria appear moreover to have excluded several crucial book reviews, in particular Stephen Hinton's essential perspective on Neumeyer's subsequent monograph.Footnote ⁵

Luttmann's commentaries for each research item fall into two distinct categories: those that describe the item objectively and those that offer a qualitative judgement. The latter offer a useful guide for the student with limited time, though Luttmann's critical evaluations need to be treated with care, as they may cause readers unjustifiably to overlook important work. The following entries illustrate these two different approaches:

Both entries summarize the central subject matter of the items concerned, but the first also imposes a qualitative judgement and therefore has the potential to influence the reader's reception of the text even before it is lifted from the shelf. Such critical interventions can have a positive effect: to point out that an article is provocative or controversial is more likely to encourage than discourage a potential reader. However, the final remark of entry 263, slighting Kater's approach to the music itself, is perhaps unnecessary.

Richard Bobbitt's 1965 critique of Hindemith's Series 1 receives a damning commentary from Luttmann, though both authors fail to fully grasp the profound theoretical implications of Hindemith's system.Footnote ⁶ Bobbitt's argument is certainly inaccurate, and it presented a significant barrier to the reception of Hindemith's theories in the latter half of the twentieth century. However, Luttmann's criticism – that ‘much of Bobbitt's argumentation is seriously flawed by his assumptions that the Series 1 arrangement represents a scale, and that its ratios yield a temperament’ – fails in many ways to clarify this central issue (105). In the German editions of the Unterweisung im Tonsatz Hindemith describes Series 1 as a ‘Reihe’, which is generally translated into English as ‘scale’ and was the term used by Schoenberg to describe his twelve-note rows. While Hindemith did not intend Series 1 to be regarded as a scale in the conventional sense – it represents an ordering, a hierarchy of pitches – the ambiguity of this term remains. Moreover, while Hindemith did not petition for Series 1 to become the foundation of a new temperament in instrumental music, he did legitimize his system within it, including a full table of precise temperaments for each pitch of his system.Footnote ⁷

Do these bibliographic guides herald the beginning of a new era in Hindemith scholarship? At the time of writing Routledge's music bibliography series is yet to attempt a volume on Monteverdi, Beethoven, Mozart, or Stravinsky, so it is curious that we already have two editions of a volume on Hindemith. Perhaps the demand for such a guide owes something to the fact that, despite his relative marginalization in scholarship, his works, especially his instrumental sonatas, enjoy constant performances. Still, the second edition will itself soon need revisiting, which is why its availability via the Routledge Music Online portal is welcome, and will, it is to be hoped, permit frequent additions and amendments.Footnote ⁸ Since the most recent entries in the second edition there have been several major academic studies, in addition to the cataloguing of further, previously unavailable primary source material. Among items that suggest a resurgence of academic interest in Hindemith are three articles in successive years in the Journal of Musicology, by David Trippett, Joel Haney, and Jeannie Guerrero.Footnote ⁹ Given the relative infrequency of journal articles devoted to the composer, this trend is unexpected, and it has been continued in 2010–11 by Daniel K. S. Walden in Music Theory Online and Kevin O'Connell in the Musical Times.Footnote ¹⁰ In its published book form, Magnus Breivik's monograph on Musical Functionalism, which focuses on Hindemith and Schoenberg, is particularly notable, as is the recent book chapter by Ian Sutherland and Tia DeNora, which uses Hindemith as a case study to explore musical creativity as social agency.Footnote ¹¹ Among the primary sources that have come to light are the Thomas Hall Collection at Yale, which I did not find listed in HRIG, and an additional blackboard fugue autograph from the 1940s.

There are few alternatives online to HRIG. The Hindemith Foundation publishes a list of Hindemith publications, and there is the seminal Grove entry by Giselher Schubert.Footnote ¹² But for anyone interested in Hindemith research, as a performer, composer or academic, HRIG is essential reading. It would be impossible to find the 1253 research items listed together anywhere else, and Luttmann's work will save potentially years of accumulated research. The Routledge music bibliography series is an invaluable resource at a time when research materials are becoming increasingly diverse, and this Hindemith volume especially should be the first source of reference for any academic study on the composer.