Hindemith was committed to music pedagogy in many ways throughout his life. This committment can already be reconised in the proclamation written for the 1922 founding of the “Community for Music” in Frankfurt. With the aim of “re-establishing the nearly lost community between performers and listeners,” the idea was to present “exclusively unknown new and old music for small ensembles” for a small circle of members. Hindemith’s contacts to the amateur music movement  “Die Musikantengilde” from 1926 were also pedagogically motivated. With the composition of music that was easy to sing and play, he hoped to facilitate access to more complex contemporary music for amateur musicians.

In 1927 Hindemith participated in negotiations over the installation of a State Music Academy in Frankfurt. A report in the form of a letter by one of his negotiating partners at the time expresses his attitudes towards the question of the education of musicians. According to this, Hindemith was of the opinion that “one pushes students in the direction of virtuosity without a corresponding need and without the necessary number of appropriately talented individuals. He was in favour of a systematically energetic training of practical musicians.” He received an opportunity to realise his concepts of a comprehensive musical education in 1927 when he accepted a professorship as composition teacher at the State Academy of Music in Berlin.

Corresponding to his conviction that the training of composers is only possible on the basis of the mastery of all technical questions, his students studied not only counterpoint and classical harmony, but were also required to familiarise themselves with specific characteristics of the instruments. Practical musical experiences with historical instruments and the confrontation with new technical achievements such as radio, film and mechanical/electronic instruments such as the Trautonium were also part of his teaching syllabus at the Berlin Academy. The composer Harald Genzmer, who studied with Hindemith in those days, remembers: “He taught harmony, counterpoint and fugue and then free composition afterwards. I very well remember a seminar at which all harmony treatises up until that time were reported on, including those by Tchaikovsky, Louis Thuille, Schönberg, etc.[…] Instruction in free composition began with simple assignments. For example, writing a woodwind trio, sketching a cycle for brass or composing a piece for string orchestra. Then followed Lieder or a set of variations for piano, until the experiences gained peaked in the problem of writing a string quartet. […] Following these smaller tasks, there was the assignment of writing a work for large a capella choir […]. Hindemith was never ironical as a teacher, but always very exacting and inexorable in his demands. He disapproved of any kind of technical sloppiness, and some young people just couldn’t cope with the strictness of his demands.”

The schematic scaffolding of his teaching contents developed in Berlin were further developed by Hindemith later on at Yale University and at the University of Zürich, expanded to include aspects of music theory and musicology.

In Hindemith’s view, the perfect mastery of craftsmanship does not of course guarantee that one will become a really great composer. Such a composer must be inspired by a musical vision in which “a piece of music in its entirety, with each of its components in the proper place,  would appear in a sudden illumination of a creative moment. […] Technical knowledge can be acquired by anyone, after all, whereas clear visions are the privilege of the truly gifted.”