MUSIC/BOSNIA

SINGING SONGS OF LOVE AND WAR

Rock Under the Siege; Radio Zid, Sarajevo

Although the outside world has heard little more coming out of Bosnia than the low rumble of artillery fire featured on the evening news, countless voices in besieged enclaves are struggling to speak to the world through music. Since the war began in 1992, more than 30 new rock bands have formed in Sarajevo alone. Many reach an avid audience via Sarajevo's Radio Zid (Radio Wall), which presents local acts on a nightly program. Last January, during a short-lived cease-fire, the station organized a concert; 14 of the live performances are compiled on a CD called Rock Under the Siege.

MUSIC/UNITED STATES

The bands range from techno acts such as A.P. Sound to would-be Nirvanas like Down; some perform in both English and Bosnian. While many of the songs strike the universal themes of heartbreak and adolescent angst, others, including D. Throne's Story from Sarajevo, set wartime laments to hard-rock beats: "Yesterday I saw my friend .../ He's on the other side/ Ask me: why/ 'Cause of religion/ It's reason why we must die." As Hrvoje Batinic, one of Radio Zid's main anchormen, writes in the liner notes, "For many of [the musicians] a guitar in a hand had the same weight as a gun that waited for them in the trenches after the rehearsal."

ART AT THE ABYSS

Mathis der Maler by Paul Hindemith; New York City Opera

IN MATHIS DER MALER (MATHIS THE ARTIST), German composer Paul Hindemith wrestled with the issue of art's role in a society plagued by oppression and misery. The opera is set amid the cataclysms of the Reformation and the Peasants' War of 1524-25; its protagonist is loosely based on the 16th century German artist Matthias Grunewald. The disillusioned Mathis renounces art to join the peasants' cause, but their brutality shatters his idealism. Redemption, he decides, comes from the acceptance of suffering and faithfulness to God.

Now infrequently produced, the opera premiered in Zurich in 1938 after Hindemith's anti-Nazi beliefs led him to flee Germany, and it portrays a tormented man tottering at the abyss. As sung by the New York City Opera cast, the gloomy work has glorious passages. Consoling a young woman who witnessed her father's slaying, Mathis describes to her the orchestra of angels on a panel of the Isenheim Altarpiece, Grunewald's masterpiece. The music's splendor evokes the painter's exalted vision.

Hindemith was just 38 when Mathis was first performed, though its brooding exploration of religious belief and its theme of futility and resignation might well have come from someone approaching the end of his creative powers. Rather than a work of bleak old age, it is an impassioned and deeply pessimistic statement by a composer at the height of his talent who sees how the soul is destroyed when art is subverted to politics, whether in Grunewald's long-ago time or in our own 20th century.

BOOKS/MEXICO

TENOR TO THE RESCUE

The Placido Domingo Brigade: A Manual Against Disaster by Emilio Diaz Cervantes; Ediciones Castillo, 182 pages

ON THE ANNIVERSARY OF THE Sept. 19, 1985, temblor that left at least 7,000 dead and 300,000 homeless, many survivors in Mexico City commemorated its victims with prayers and wreaths of white carnations. Thousands of others who still lack permanent housing poured into the capital's main plaza to demand that the government replace their destroyed homes. Two days later, an earthquake in the southern part of the country reminded Mexicans of how vulnerable they are.

Just published, The Placido Domingo Brigade could be the best source of information if history is repeated. In 1985 the city's citizens were the city's rescuers, banding together to pull people from the rubble and providing food and water for volunteers and survivors alike. Emilio D’az Cervantes, an engineer and a former police chief in suburban Satelite, worked for six weeks with a group led by tenor Placido Domingo at a collapsed apartment building in the city's Tlatelolco section. He affectingly describes the harrowing days at the site, where a number of Domingo's relatives had been trapped on the building's sixth floor. From this experience the author frames practical advice on how to reduce casualties in future emergencies. The Mexico City News praised the book as an accessible account of "what to do, how to act and how to avoid serious injury in case of earthquake.'' With its criticism of the bureaucracy for its initial refusal of foreign-aid relief and for the overall paucity of official disaster plans, Brigade is bound to be unpopular in government offices.

ART/GERMANY

TOWARD A MORE PERFECT UNION

Shunga: Erotic Woodcuts of 17th to 19th Century Japan; Kunsthalle, Darmstadt

SHUNGA, LITERALLY "PICTURES of spring," are part of a long artistic tradition in Japan, but to the prudish not entirely an honorable one. Shunga are erotic portrayals celebrating the union of man and woman as a natural--and delightful--function of life. The genre entered its Golden Age in the Edo period, 1600 to 1868, with woodblock prints that were collected by wealthy patrons. Today a criminal code prohibits the public sale of "obscene" illustrations, but in the case of shunga the law is not always strictly enforced. The first uncensored shunga prints in a book were published in 1991, and museums and galleries do exhibit shunga--though only the relatively bland pictures.

The first exhibit of shunga in Germany--and only the second one in Europe--is currently at Darmstadt's art museum. The works, including 35 superb woodcuts by Hokusai as well as scrolls and illustrations by other masters, are from the renowned Japanese art collection of Gerhard Pulverer, a professor at the University of Cologne. On 12 scrolls made by various artists, famous courtesans play coy peek-a-boo with their exquisite costumes. Originally, such works might have been displayed in brothels or owned by respectable families as a form of sex education for daughters who had come of age. Noting the sophistication of composition and details of furnishing and dacor, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung said of the exhibit, "The form is everything." Everything? Explain that to the censors.

--By Julie Dam and Emily Mitchell. Reported by Elizabeth Love/Mexico City; Satsuki Oba/Tokyo; Rhea Schoenthal/Bonn; Alexandra Stiglmayer/Sarajevo