Art & Creativity Quote by Paul Hindemith

Hindemith frames music less as self-expression than as a temporary ceasefire contract. “Cannot be enemies” is deliberately absolute, then immediately qualified: “at least while the music lasts.” The line works because it refuses the sentimental claim that art fixes politics; it argues something sharper and more credible - that coordination changes what hostility is allowed to do, if only for a shared duration.

The intent is practical, almost engineer-like: making music together forces a kind of mutual dependency. You have to listen, anticipate, compromise on tempo, dynamics, and tuning. Even disagreement gets routed into a common task. That’s the subtext: music doesn’t make you morally better, it makes you behaviorally compatible. You can hate someone in theory, but you can’t phrase a line, breathe together, or hold ensemble balance if you’re committed to sabotaging the other person in real time. The social technology of rehearsal - repetition, correction, accountability - becomes a civics lesson without the sermon.

Context matters. Hindemith lived through the violent churn of early 20th-century Europe, and he watched culture get drafted into ideology. His own music was attacked under Nazi cultural policy, and he left Germany. Against that backdrop, the quote reads as wary humanism: not a naive belief in harmony as destiny, but a bet on shared practice as one of the few spaces where people must negotiate rather than dominate.

The sting is in the ending. When the music stops, so can the truce. Hindemith isn’t promising peace; he’s pointing to a method - fragile, time-bound, repeatable.