Henderson daily dispatch., 1937-04-19

York
lT. 8>.A m
kEd1neSASs!eu


piece. spent an evening with a group
at his flat recently. He occurs, prob
abby, with variations, in every world
metropolis, but it is rarely that the
citizen has an opportunity to examine
his ilk at first hand.
He has a cult around him and yet
he is no Greenwich Village phoney
easily dismissed. He has intelligence
and imagination and industry. He has
no sense of humor, but then, with
that, he could not be what he is.
He believes that all art-music,
painting, fiction-can be reduced to
mathematical formulate Indeed, he
has reduced them ALL His apartment
is lined with sleek framed abstruc-
tons, whorls and arabesques and
prisms. which were done icy his
pupils" His chef d'oeuvre is a Zero
cious visage, executed with a ruled
preciseness of color and line, framed
by wood and unequal thicknesses; he
likes to tell that the frame had to be
made especially by a picture-framing
firm which charged a stiff fee for
such iconoclastic goings-on-on because
they were unable to see the absolute
necessity foI different widths of wood
On all 'foU, sides
But m src is his forte He has that
all worked out, too, in neat formulate.
Some OF his pupils have gone on to
Hollywood ard Tin Pan Alley and
made thousands of dollars a week.
The man undoubtedly has flair for
the auFtere poetry of higher mathe-
mates and the kinship of mathema-
tics and music is clear-so that you
feel that undoubtedly he has impress
eel and no doubt helped a number of
talented composers.
Then he tells you that great music
can be produced by the application of
h;seque tons and geometries. He has
never troubled to produced any him
self, for he is a teacher-a Tugwell of
the arts, as it were-who dispenses
Sesames and lets the worldlings use
them if they can. He says that Beet
hoven and Wagner and Brahms were
overreted slaves of Tradition who
could have done much better work
with the aid of his formulate.
Then he plays records for the COM
pany. He plays one with a chorus
and some pleasant, Gershwinesque
trimmings, which is entitled some
thing like, Swing, Mother-in-Law,
Swing" He plays another, with sim
liar melodic furnishing, which pur-
ports to be a satiric hymn to George
Bernard Shaw, with male chorus. A
third is a Encouragement in ia of
Hearts and Flower. The work of
pupils.
You are troubled and fascinated.
You look at the man with increasing
amazement You venture a mild de-
murrer to his neat solutions for the
bleak ecstasies and despairs which
have moved men to paint and write
and compose music for so long and
long. He becomes angry, excited. He
blasts you with the rejoinder that you
are trying to criticize something utter
ly beyond your comprehension. You
retreat to silence, lest you cause dis
ruptlon, unsocially, in the party. The
young bohemian couple, his worship
full converts, glare at you and are
sorry they brought you into the Pres
ence.
At last, after a bewildered session
with his wallpaper, in flaming pat
eOlllo oIO OUC1lillS COlOr schemes you
could not imagine anywhere except in
the salon of Gertrude Stein, you learn
that great novels and short stories
can be produced under his simple re-
cipes in the same way. Now you are
really rapt. You ask for samples.
But at this point the young bohe-
mian couple speaks up in chorus and
urges him not to bring out his sngle
prose Sample. 1t is not a good ex-
ample of his mathematical alchemy.
After all, he does not know English
well enough-it is not his native ton
gue-to achieve the perfect result,
even working, as always, through a
Pupil. You are genuinely disappointed
And after viewing some lovely 16-
mlllimeter movies in color, of scenic
wanderers, topped off by a Ratchet
faced lady with cosmic wiggles, in the
hroes of expressing Infinity, accord
ng to the formula, you take your
cave. You like your host obscurely.
You think he is sort of artistic DR..
townsend, at once too sophisticated
and naive but you like him. You ap-
prove of him, even-as a magnificent
purple patch in the gray pattern of
1o