The Jenny and Antti Wihuri Foundation is a Finnish non-profit organization founded in 1942 by industrialist Antti Wihuri and his wife, Jenny Wihuri, with the purpose of supporting cultural and economic development in Finland. The Foundation awards scholarships and prizes on an annual basis on October 9, the birthday of Antti Wihuri. Between 1942 and 2016, the Foundation had awarded grants of 274 million of euros. In 2016, the total value of grants and prizes awarded by the Foundation amounted to 11,2 million euros.

Paul Hindemith was a German and American composer, music theorist, teacher, violist and conductor. He founded the Amar Quartet in 1921, touring extensively in Europe. As a composer, he became a major advocate of the Neue Sachlichkeit style of music in the 1920s, with compositions such as Kammermusik, including works with viola and viola d'amore as solo instruments in a neo-Bachian spirit. Other notable compositions include his song cycle Das Marienleben (1923), Der Schwanendreher for viola and orchestra (1935), the opera Mathis der Maler (1938), the Symphonic Metamorphosis of Themes by Carl Maria von Weber (1943), and the oratorio When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd (1946), a requiem based on Walt Whitman's poem. Hindemith and his wife emigrated to Switzerland and the United States ahead of World War II, after worsening difficulties with the Nazi German regime. In his later years, he conducted and recorded much of his own music.