Hindemith, Schenker, and the University of North Texas: Early Comparative Studies of Hindemith and Schenker Produced at the University of North Texas During the mid-1950s.
Michael Lively, University of North Texas
Shortly after Robert W. Ottman joined the full time music faculty of the University of North Texas he became involved with the supervision of two very unusual, and perhaps remarkably forward-looking, master's theses. These student projects -- Grace E. Knod's "A Comparison of the Hindemith and Schenker Concepts of Tonality" and Nathan Miron's "The Analytical Systems of Hindemith and Schenker as Applied to Two Works of Arnold Schoenberg" -- were submitted to the university in 1955 and 1956 respectively, narrowly in advance of the revised edition of Heinrich Schenker's Free Composition and well ahead of the important body of English-language investigation of the Schenkerian system that appeared in the late twentieth century. Amazingly, the primary analytical focus of these works was devoted to the analysis of either pre-tonal music, including the works dating from as far back as the thirteenth century, or to the analysis of post-tonal and atonal music from the twentieth century.
In many ways the work of Ottman's students seems to pre-figure the extreme avant-garde of Schenkerian thought that developed several decades after the theses were submitted. The idea of systematically integrating the analytical methods of Heinrich Schenker and Paul Hindemith remains as compelling today as it must have seemed to Robert W. Ottman and his students during the mid 1950s, yet this important and still relevant area of research is largely unexplored by both Hindemith scholars and Schenkerian music theorists.