Paul Hindemith is one of the four pillars that support the grand edifice of contemporary music, the other three being Arnold Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, and Bela Bartok. This is not to say that the first prizes of artistic quality belong only to them. The simple point is that their historical positions cannot be occupied by anyone else. Hindemith enters into the foursome as a logical theoretician and practitioner of a new system of tonal thought, a new expanded - understanding of tonality, making him the inevitable antipode of Schoenberg with his serial organization of the chromatic scale.