A cappella choral music by Paul Hindemith, partly unpublished at the time of the recording, sung by the Rundfunkchor Berlin under Stefan Parkman. It spans two decades, from the Five Songs on Old Texts of 1937 to the madrigals of 1958, and ends with a set of canons full of puns. Hindemith held this kind of singing in high regard. In 1952 he wrote that the art of a cappella ensemble singing "can be thought of as the measure of the achievement of the musical culture of any particular period".

Hindemith (1895-1963) was a German composer, violist, teacher and conductor, born in Hanau. Parkman is a Swedish conductor and tenor, born in Uppsala in 1952, who became senior professor of choral conducting at Uppsala University. The recording was made in 1996 for the Edition Paul Hindemith.

The Six Chansons (1939) set French poems by Rainer Maria Rilke: "La Biche", "Un Cygne", "Puisque tout passe", "Printemps", "En hiver" and "Verger". They are short, eight minutes in all. The Zwölf Madrigale (1958) for five voices set texts by Josef Weinheber and form the heart of the disc at thirty-four minutes. Their titles range from "Mitwelt" and "Eines Narren, eines Künstlers Leben" to "Trink aus!", "Judaskuß", "Magisches Rezept" and "Kraft fand zu Form". The English Five Songs on Old Texts (1937) include "True Love", a "Trooper's Drinking Song" and "The Devil a monk would be!".

The nine Kanons a cappella, about eleven minutes in all, reveal Hindemith's love of word games and his sense of humour. One stutters the name of a fellow composer, "Othmar Sch Sch Sch Schoeck". Another asks what the world would be without "unseren Igor", and one celebrates a concert hall's fortieth anniversary. Others are in Latin or English, from "Sine musica nulla disciplina" to "Oh, threats of Hell and Hopes of Paradise!", and the set closes with "Wir sind froh (sowieso)".

CD, Wergo WER 6629 2, released in 1998 in the Edition Paul Hindemith, total time 61'26".