The Journal Herald from Dayton, Ohio • 27

November 21, 1981 JOURNAL HERALD 27 These three works of Milton Glaser are part of the show which opens tomorrow at Rainbow Gallery440 on East Fifth Street. Staff photos by Walt Kleine Rainbow 440 Milton Glaser originals, posters launch new gallery Vf i 1 I has some thought behind it, not just pure emotion." RAINBOW440 should meet a need. For, unless one is able to deal directly with an artist or visit out-of-town galleries, there isn't much top-notch contemporary art available locally especially at "affordable" prices. And, Preston says he plans to make a "constant effort to keep that range of prices The word 'affordable' is very, very important And, I know that kind of art, affordable art, does exist." The unanswered question, however, is what kind of art will seWin this community? "In this community? It's very hard to tell there's never really been an opportunity to find out. And, we do have to think about that.

We have to think about being able to keep the doors open. We're not going to go out and buy $200,000 paintings or $500,000 lithos we're not that kind of gallery. The plain truth is we're just starting and we have a idea and we think that idea will go. "I THINK there's going to be an influx of people back (into the city) I really do The condominiums they're putting up that are selling for $40,000 or $50,000 people are going to need something for their walls." And they'll buy it in Dayton? "Why not, if it's available. I think people would buy a $25 poster something different, something of visual value more readily than a run-of-the-mill one for $10 I think there are a lot of people from here who now go to Cincinnati or New York to buy.

Cleveland, Columbus, Akron there are several nice galleries in Akron." Why not here? RAINBOW440 plans to specialize on posters and prints, complemented by signed and numbered originals. They'll also do framing and special order graphics "I can get them within 24 hours." Age-wise the appeal is expected to be for those between 25 and 55: "People who want something in their homes and also see the possibility of art as an investment. There's a drawing over there by the wall that sold in 1967 for $150 now, it's $2,400." By Richard Schwarze Journal Htrald Arh CriKc Jim Preston's enthused as well he should be for Jim Prestonartist, is also Jim Prestonart director of the gallery which opens its doors at 440 E. Fifth St. tomorrow.

The Gallery name? Rainbow Gallery440. The first show? Originals and prints by Milton Glaser a first rank name in graphics who's had a one-man show at the Museum of Modern Art, who recently had an exhibit in the Pompidou Cultural Center in Paris, who currently has works on exhibit in Tel Aviv. And, if the name's still not familiar, Glaser's the artist whose largest work to date is a 600-foot mural for the new Federal Office Building in Indianapolis, an artist who has designed book covers, magazines, Inserts for Bob Dylan albums, who has been profiled in Time and Newsweek and who coin-cldently is co-author of The Underground Gourmet. RAINBOW440 (yes, there is a link to the Rainbow in the Arcade) will operate, Preston says, on the precepts of quality art at affordable prices. The offerings and Rainbow440 is of a size where 40-50 works are about all that can be hung at one time will be priced from $35 to $2,400.

The Glaser show continues through Jan. 1 (a film on the artist will be shown at tomorrow's opening). And, the type of art one can expect to see after the Glaser show can be figured out by listening to the plans of Jim Preston: "I'm interested in constructions in work that's been made from materials man has basically thrown away And, I'm going to be looking at a lot of Impressionists, post-Impressionists I'm going to be looking at 20th century art Living artists. My interest lies In showing artists who are active now I would say from Mondrian when I am convinced painting died from Mondrian on. Those are my preferences." ONE THING Preston does not want Rainbow440 to become is trendy: "Trends come and go (a so-called 'New American Realism's' popular now) An artist sees the consciousness of the society in which he lives and he portrays that to some extent.

He sees it; he brings it into his studio and then brings it back out again in a physical form: shape, color and so forth. "And, what I've been seeing in New York is a lot of garbage art there must be a lot of garbage in New York. You see a lot of stuff thrown and smacked and splattered and burnt and rubbed and gouged. "I wouldn't care to live there if this (kind of art) reflects the consciousness of that society I would rather have art that Rainbow Gallery440 on East Fifth Street holds its opening celebration from 2 to 8 p.m. tomorrow.

Regular gallery hours will be from 10 a.m. to 1 p.m. and 3 to 6 p.m. Mondays through Saturdays. Prints and posters of Milton Glaser will be featured through Jan.

10. mderni He was simply a musician who produced 'music as a tree bears fruit' Well, not really By Richard Schwarze Journal Htrald Aril Critic "There is nothing at all academic about Hindemith. He is simply a musician who produces music as a tree bears fruit, without further philosophic purpose. There is nothing essentially wrong with Einstein's thumbnail sketch except that it's the kind of simplification composer Paul Hindemith would have detested. Hindemith hated niches, labels, clever prose which attempted to reduce human complexity to a handful of tidy words.

And, he had reason. For, along about 1 927, the 32 year-old Hindemith decided music was too isolated from most people a condition he tried to remedy. While not abandoning the Goebbels again: "Opportunity creates not only thieves but also atonal musicians who in order to make a sensation exhibit on the stage nude women in the most disgusting and obscene situations, and further befoul these scenes with the most atrocious dissonance of musical impotence." Even more disturbing to the government was Hindemith's later work Mathis der Maler, whose theme the defeat of German liberalism during the peasant revolts that marked the end of medieval serfdom had "dangerous implications" in 1934. Shortly before the outbreak of World War II therefore, Hindemith came to this country and joined the faculty at Yale University. His composing continued works of incredible intelligence, structure, spaciousness.

Sometimes, in his last compositions, a mystical strain creeps in, a retrospective tone, as one musicologist says, "a gentle nostalgia." SHORTLY AFTER Hindemith arrived in this country, the German critic H.H. Stuckenschmidt penned the following intimate sketch: "A friendly boyish head, its blond hair tinged of late years with gray, surmounts a lithe, youthful figure. Small in stature, Paul Hindemith likes to make himself smaller still by sitting on a low hassock. He prefers to remain close to the earth. From this vantage point, he leads the conversation unobtrusively, a clever, learned, inexorably logical participant, a little malicious, but friendly even in his malice.

His knowledge embraces not only the music of every age, but also the oldest and newest arts of poetry and painting. His talk is not abstract but concrete, his point of view realistic "To learn and to teach are his passions. Even after he was a composer of world fame he took special lessons in branches of musical science that, with his manifold activities he would not have been able to master alone. His pupils bear him an affection which is not the expression of a fanatic cult. He is never the distant the coworker, an older, more experienced colleague of his pupils.

There is really no other musician who has attracted such a large following of young men." Hindemith died in 1963. His works remain a staple for orchestras and soloists. And, the impact of his teaching is still felt by composers, everywhere. HINDEMITH'S impact on music is incredible. He and Richard Strauss were easily the most esteemed composers in Germany between the world wars.

In his first works, he embraced German Romanticism. Then, in his early operas, he flirted briefly with expressionism. Finally he developed a form of linear counterpoint his models being the great contrapuntal forms of the Baroque era: concerto grosso, passacaglia and chaconne, toccata, fugue. Conversely, he was, at the same time, one of the first European composers to show an interest in jazz. And, while his early works tended to be filled with a harsh irony, his later ones showed a growing gentleness.

His poetic lyricism increasingly asserted itself and ultimately brought him back to a bit of the romantic he had initially rejected. Hindemith arrived at his "style" in a series of seven works Kammermusik (Chamber Music) written between 1922 and 1930. Stylistically these compositions looked backward and forward at the same time backward to the contrapuntal music of Bach, forward to the freedom of tonality of the 20th century. One German critic capsulized them as "Brandenburg concertos upside down." HINDEMITH wrote an enormous amount of music the best of which ranks with the best of this century. Still he was not someone Germany wanted around in the early 1930s.

He was too modern for a Nazi regime that recognized the Wagnerian as the proper path for contemporary German music. Propaganda Minister Goebbels, therefore, accused him or "atrocious dissonance," "cultural Bolshevism," "spiritual non-Aryanism." His music was banned as being "unbearable to the Third Reich." Suddenly, one of Germany's greatest composers, greatest teachers, a first rank viola virtuoso, a member of the august German Academy was persona non grata. "When a man like Hindemith," wrote Alfred Rosenberg, chief of the Nazi Foreign Affairs Bureau, in Die Musik (January, 1935), "commits the foulest perversion of German music, we have the right to reject him." Hindemith was rejected because he was married to a Jewess, had made recordings with Jews and refused to break his friendships with noted Jewish musicians. In addition, there was the matter of his music. Any type of progressive tendencies in art were considered undesirable in Hindemith's case the objections were specific as well as philosophical.

A PROVOCATIVE incident in Neus von Tage(m aria sung in a bathtub) was cited as indicative of Hindemith's "degeneracy." complexities of his other compositions, he began augmenting his output with works specifically designed for amateurs; he began writing for radio, pianola, bands, theater, film, music for children. Unfortunately, in discussing his concept of spreading music with a group of conductors he described these works as Gebrauchsmusik a label which eventually preceded him to America (when the Nazis wanted no part of him), and which plagued him the rest of his life. HINDEMITH his words from the early 1950s: "A quarter of a century ago, in a discussion I pointed out the danger of an esoteric Isolationism in music by using the term Gebrauchmusik. Apart from the ugliness of the word in German it is as hideous as its English equivalents: workaday music, music for use, utility music, and similar verbal beauties nobody found anything remarkable in it Whatever else I said at that time remained deservedly unknown But, some busybody had written a report on that totally unimportant discussion, and when I first came to America years later, it had preceded me. The slogan Gebrauchsmusik hit me wherever I went; it had grown to be as abundant, useless and disturbing as thousands of dandelions in a lawn.

Up to this day it has been impossible to kill the silly term and the unscrupulous classification that goes with it." IT ISA SILLY term, an attempt at simplification, a fallacious label appended to extremely diverse music penned by an extremely complex and important artist. Still, to write about Paul Hindemith a composer "German to the core" is another Hindemith label is of necessity to simplify. Violistcomposerscholarauthorteacher Paul Hindemith is far too complex to capture truly in brief prose pieces. One can capture one facet of the man, maybe two but, the essence of Hindemith can't be recreated with a handful of words any more than that of a rainbow can be with a fistful of colored pencils. Bear that in mind as you read on.

PAUL HINDEMITH (one of whose quartets will be performed by the Grotrian Ensemble in Yellow Springs tonight) his words again, words in which it might be argued that even he sometimes fell prey to the oversimplification syndrome: "People who make music together cannot be' enemies, at least not while the music lasts." "The proclamation of one's modernity is the most efficient cover for a bad "The reactions music evokes are not feeling, but they are the Images, memories of feelings. Dreams, memories, musical reactions all three are made of the same stuff." I iiirlin Hull ijiiBlt.ifefei...... The Grotrian Ensemble performs a quartet by Paul Hindemith as part of their 8 pan. concert today In Antioch College's Kelly Hall. Also programmed are Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Meter (Time) and Debussy'i Violin-Piano SonaU which dates from 1917.

The concert is free. Paul Hindemith.