Question: Hello, Lyn, I'm from Los Angeles. My question is about culture. Now, you've written in some of your papers that, in a Classical work of composition, -- actually I have two parts.

In a Classical work of composition, [you've written] that the composer's communicating ideas about how you communicate ideas. So I was wondering if you would elaborate on that, number one.

And number two, from the standpoint of what you've discussed in terms of the generation of a singularity, from the point of generation, to the point of impact, is an unmediated relationship. Now, from, say, the point of generation of a singularity by a Beethoven, or Shakespeare, or something, to the point that you want it to impact the mind of an audience, it has to be performed by someone, but yet, how do you make that performance an actual unmediated relationship between the composer and the audience?

LaRouche: Let's take the second one first. It works better that way. Because the answer to the second question illustrates what the meaning of the first question is.

Now, take the case of a composer. A Classical composer -- and I have in mind, just to have a specific focus -- I have in mind a performance that was done in my birthday celebration, by a leading string quartet in the world today, and it was the Opus 131 of Beethoven, late string quartet. This is an excellent performance. They may, when they issue the thing themselves, they may touch up a few spots here and there, but, to my standpoint, it's a very good performance. And in those of good musicians who've heard it. It's an excellent performance.

All right, now, this work, this late work of Beethoven, and these late compositions -- the 127, 131, 132, and so forth, 135 -- they're very intense compositions. The Great Fugue, the 133, is an example of that. They are a new kind of composition. It's a revolution in composition. It's an evolving development concept, as opposed to the structures which Beethoven inherited for the string quartet, and so forth, earlier.

But when these compositions, which actually follow a line of principle, defined by Bach, which is accessible to many people in terms of the preludes and fugues, first and second book, these contain the germ of many things. For example, you take the second fugue, the C minor, from the first book of Preludes and Fugues, contains in germ the same principle which is elaborated in the later Musical Offering by Bach, and also is a subject implicitly in the Art of the Fugue of Bach. So, these principles are all the way through.

Now, how does it work? The fugal counterpoint makes the point clear. The composer starts from a single idea -- that's your singularity.

Now the composer wants to convey that idea, which, to that composer, that single idea elaborates to a large concept. The composer is now then going to work out the composition, from the standpoint of that generating point. And he's going to perfect, he's going to pare it, he's going to improve it, and so forth, but to make it coherent with this generating point, the single idea. And the Beethoven, say, the 131, is an example of that. It's a perfect example of a single idea, as a germ, elaborated through successive phases, seven successive primary phases of development, from beginning to end. It's a unit idea.

And that's the general nature of all artistic composition.

Now, the conductor. the composer, and the performer.

The problem of performance is that the performer must never play notes. The performer must never play different notes than are specified, but the performer must never play notes. He must never interpret the notes -- that's romanticism. He must perform the unit idea, the germ idea. He must first adduce what that germ idea is, that principle of development, which is single idea, and he must present that in the following way.

Take, now shift to the Classical in general. Let's take a drama, let's take a Shakespeare drama. Now, look at Hamlet of Shakespeare from the standpoint of the opening of Shakespeare's King Henry V, in which he has a character come on stage, before the stage, of the Shakespearean stage, who's speaking a soliloquy to the audience. And he's telling the audience that they're not going to see the drama on stage, -- they're going to see this, and they're going to see that, the actors and so forth -- but they're not going to see the horses, they're not going to see all the things that are being... the events that are occurring in the drama. They have to see them on the plane of the imagination.

So, in a great drama, the test of a great dramatic performance, of a great drama, you get in the theater, and very soon, in the beginning of the performance, you no longer see the actors. The actors have disappeared. You now actually are thinking, and following, a drama which is going on on the stage of your imagination. And when the play is finished, and your eyes are opened to the actors coming forth on stage, you see the actors again, as opposed to the characters of the drama. And you have this experience that they're somehow, they're not the same, but they are the same. They are the same actors who played the characters. They're costumed as the characters were costumed, in your imagination. But they're not the same people. If you talk to one of the actors afterward, you're convinced they're not the same people -- it's not the character in your imagination.

Or, go back to the ancient Greek theater, in which a few people, wearing masks, maybe two people wearing masks, would present a Classical drama. And they would convince the audience in the amphitheater, that the audience was seeing what they were seeing in the imagination. The actors on stage were simply holding masks, and they were playing different characters from behind the masks, but just holding masks.

So, in musical composition, the same thing is true. The performer, must, from the first note, must capture the imagination of the audience. Because everything must be heard in the imagination, not just as heard sounds. You see this in Keats' Ode to a Grecian Urn. He describes some of the figures painted on this urn, and he says something which is very true, and uses that poem as a way of saying it: "For Truth is Beauty, and Beauty is Truth." He's speaking of the permanence of those figures. That those figures on that vase have been proportioned in such a way, they do not represent still life. They represent life in motion.

For example, take the case of Rembrandt's Aristotle, or shall we say, Homer Contemplating the Stupid Aristotle. You see the bust of Homer, and the figure portrayed by Aristotle, putting his hand on the head of the bust of Homer. Aristotle is looking straight ahead. Homer is looking up at this stupid Aristotle.

So, therefore, in the imagination, the characters come to life. Homer comes to life. The point is made.

The great performer -- take a conductor such as Furtwaengler. Now, Furtwaengler would sometimes play a trick which we call the lunge. He would rehearse the orchestra, chorus or orchestra, thoroughly. Then he would come on stage. The orchestra is alert. They're tense. They're waiting for the first stroke. And it comes to them as a surprise. And by that method of conducting, Furtwaengler often is able to achieve the instant capture of the attention of the audience to the domain of the imagination, rather than the sound of a note. And that's what all great drama does, what all great art does. It captures the imagination, and it takes the mind beyond the domain of sense perception, into the sense of real relations beyond sense perception. Just as good science does.

And Classical art, and Classical science, all have that quality. It is that quality, the quality which is against everything Ernst Mach ever stood for, against everything empiricism ever represented, against every idea that Bertrand Russell ever had, which are the ideas also of Plato. To look,... our senses are imperfect. Our senses do not show us the real world. The senses show us the reaction of them, to the real world. Our problem as human beings is to discover what the real world is, what the real relations are in the world. That's a practical question, but the question is, how can we change our experience in a way which we could acquire knowledge. Therefore, we have to go beyond sense perception, into the world beyond senses, and find principles out there, which we can now command.

Take, for example, microphysics. Think of nuclear microphysics. Think of the power of man which is lodged in control of the principles of nuclear microphysics. Tell me when the senses have ever seen a principle of nuclear microphysics. No human sense could ever see such a principle. Yet we as man, by discovering those principles, are able to discover those principles, and discover how to control them.

The same thing is true in art. The same thing is true in all science. That we're trying to get beyond the feeling, by finding the paradoxes, the ambiguities, in sense perception. We're trying to find the cracks in sense perception, which give us a clue, as to what is really out there, beyond our sense.

All great Classical art, Classical drama, tries to do. All great science tries to do that. And that's the unifying principle of the two. The problem often is, that people don't know those principles; they don't understand that concept. What we try to do in art, and great artists do this, they do this in the great performance of the Classical stage, they do it in great musical performances. A great musical performance, a great Classical drama, performed in a language that people understood, will be a powerful thing, which will open the minds of people to things about themselves that they didn't know existed earlier. It's called insight, insight into one's self. You go out of the theater, after a musical performance, or a drama, as Schiller said, and you go out a better person than you walked in. Not because you've been taught some precept, but because you've had an insight into what it is to be human. And you go out feeling better about yourself, because now you know you're human. You feel stronger about being human, and you feel less attached to the infirmities of the flesh.

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