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Lyndon LaRouche
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Lyndon LaRouche
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Lyndon LaRouche Answers to emails

On Music

My musical interest is centered in three points of intersection.

  1. The relevance of the Pythagorean comma, as an expression of method which separates singing, especially contrapuntal singing, from beating mechanical instruments; this means a human value, as demonstrated by the challenge of singing Classical vocal counterpoint, such as that of Bach, rather than a limited numerical vaue;

  2. The basis for music in the Florentine bel canto method of voice-training associated with the Cathedral of Florence;

  3. The course of development leading through figures such as John Bull and the Bach family, to the founding of J. S. Bach’s revolution in well-tempered choral singing, and the sequels of Bach’s revolution, in opposition to the mechanistic work of Rameau and Fux,  as the Classical method of composition of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Mendelssohn, Schumann, Brahms, and Dvorak.

We have also given much attention to the so-called Negro Spiritual, as Dvorak did, and to the function of Classical composition and methods of performance in the Bach vocal-polyphonic tradition in treating material from the domain of folk-song tradition.

 Generally, I regard these approaches as the road to “fun,” to the joy of working with music.

—Lyndon.

On the Question of Race

There is only one human “race.” All share, as a single species, the same potential for expressing those qualities which set all sections of the human population from the apes and other lower forms of life.  There is no section of humanity which does not have the same type and relative degree of potential for scientific and Classical cultural development and achievement.  No beastly species could actually recognize a universal physical principle, or true principle of practice of Classical artistic culture. Those are facts susceptible of conclusive scientific demonstration.

The principle differences in manifest performance of members of the human species are cultural. The cultural distinctions fall into three general, distinct but overlapping classifications.

  1. The positive aspect of cultural differences are typified by differences in language-cultures.  Here, we are obliged to denounce the lunacy of Tower-of-Babel-like schemes such as “Esperanto.” The distinction of all healthy branches of language-culture is the degree of their relative development as media employed to express non-literal meanings called ironies.  That latter is the living characteristic of a literate form of language and of its use.  As we know from study of the progress of science in various literate forms of European languages since ancient Classical Greece, all these languages are capable of development of the ability to express equivalent degrees of literacy in the constructive role of Classical irony in the progress of science and of Classical culture. This is the principle on which a viable form of sovereign nation-state depends.

  2. However, there are also inferior cultures.  These differences are expressed either as relative degree of positive development, or by specifically pathological features, such as philosophical liberalism of the Anglo- Dutch Liberal or comparable varieties.

  3. The most common pathological problem is that presented dramatically, by the poet Aeschylus’ “Prometheus Bound.”  Zeus condemned Prometheus to torment for permitting human beings to gain knowledge of the use of fire!  In prevalent expressions of culture in the U.S. today, even advanced education tends to destroy the ability of students to understand actual universal physical principles, and, instead, teaches them, like trained monkeys. to substitute the name of a mere mathematical formula for the idea of an actual, experimentally defined universal physical principle.

The chief problem of the U.S. population today, is the post-1945 program of mass-brainwashing conducted by networks such as The Congress for Cultural Freedom.  This type of program, modelled upon the existentialist depravity of the so-called Frankfurt-School freaks such as Adorno and Arendt, is the leading edge of what has corrupted the morals and mental powers of the upper-twenty-percentile of income-brackets of the so-called Baby-Boomer (“68ers” generation.

The problem is those criminals who seek to degrade human beings to a brutish state of relative illiteracy, as virtually modern “beasts of the field.”

—Lyndon.

Protectionism

Fair trade wrecked the U.S. economy under the Democrats prior to  President Lincoln; protectionism repeatedly rescued the U.S. economy from disaster; fair trade has’ always, inevitably ruined us.  Nothing printable can be honestly said about the effects of “fair trade.”  Like prostitution, it gives satisfaction to the unwitting, but not for long.

The modern problems of Africa, especially sub-Saharan Africa, date from the Spanish and Portguese forces, allied with the Habsburg monarchy, which, beginning approximately the earliest Sixteenth Century, created the modern practice of slavery against Africans, a practice taken over by the emerging British Empire of the 1763, on, which has managed “Africa” savagely, especially since Kitchener’s operation of 1898. The problem is, as I think that you know and believe, that the present conditions in Africa are chiefly products of the radiated effects of those original Spanish and later Anglo-Dutch Liberal practices against Africa.

My practical problem on this account today, is that Europeans and Americans refuse to understand this history and its present result, and that many Africans, too, prefer to overlook some of the most significant of the ways in which the Anglo-Americans attempt to manipulate Africans’ own view of continuing causes of the situation today. How do I induce Americans, for example, to understand the terrible realities of sub- Saharan Africa today?

For this purpose I have adopted the lesson of the Baltimore syndrome, a once leading city of the U.s., a few decades back, which is largely a hell-hole today.  The problems we are able to show in the Baltimore case’s patterns of poverty, disease- complexes, and mental regression today, are not a simple copy of Africa’s problems, but they are American conditions which, if understood by Americans, will open their eyes to the nature,causes, and possible remedies for the perils of Africa today.

As we progress in crafting our report on the Baltimore syndrome,you should be able to see how Americans can be brought to understood how Americans should think about the leading systemic problems of Africa today. For example, comparing the way in which HIV spreads in Africa, to similar disease-complex patterns which erupted to popular attention in the USA during the early 1980s and later, is the way in which Americans can be brought to understand the principled nature of the causes underlying the development of dynamic forms of disease-and-poverty complexes in Africa, as sources of insight into a different, but similar complex of problems in Africa.  Mobilizing the conscience of the U.S. in this way, is an important part of the possible general solution for the crisis.

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schiller@schillerinstitute.org

The Schiller Institute
PO BOX 20244
Washington, DC 20041-0244
703-297-8368

Thank you for supporting the Schiller Institute. Your membership and contributions enable us to publish FIDELIO Magazine, and to sponsor concerts, conferences, and other activities which represent critical interventions into the policy making and cultural life of the nation and the world.

Contributions and memberships are not tax-deductible.

VISIT THESE OTHER PAGES:

Home | Search | About | Fidelio | Economy | Strategy | The LaRouche Frameup | Conferences
Links | LaRouche | Music | Join | Books | Concerts | Highlights  | Education |
Health | Spanish Pages | Poetry | Dialogue of Cultures
 Maps | What's New

© Copyright Schiller Institute, Inc. 2006. All Rights Reserved.