Question: Good day, Lyn. I'm studying music, and I'm about to finish my studies in music. I asked you before about paradoxes in music, and more or less, I tried to understand what you told me from what I know about harmony. I can say that, technically, the paradox is a drastic change in harmony--or my hypothesis was that. I wanted to follow a musical system, and then change it, and I wanted you to develop more about the paradox: How does it occur? And when does it occur in music? Or from the standpoint, that, if you are analyzing the play, or you are interpreting, and I want to compose something, how can I create, if I compose something, a paradox? Should I start by having a base of harmony, and how can I elaborate more on those paradoxes?

LaRouche: Well, the idea of using harmony, or a system of harmony, is a very tricky proposition [laughing]--because, yes, admittedly, what you perceive is a change in the harmonics. But, also you'll get that with Romanticism, as well as Classical composition. For example Liszt, for example, is a fairly clever fellow--not as clever as he thought he was, but was clever and he was quite physically capable, of course. But, he would make changes, which were called "passage work" changes--I'm sure you know what I mean by "passage work." Whereas, in a Classical composition, passage work never occurs, except when some poor fool, who doesn't understand Classical composition uses passage work, or interprets a composition, which is a Classical composition, from the standpoint of passage work. You get problems then.

But, in general, the change of harmony is not the principle. The way to get this--the only way I know that is reliable, is: You start with Bach. Because Bach was a great genius, who made the discoveries on which great modern music depends absolutely. And, everyone who's done, say, keyboard work, or anything else, has probably worked through a lot of the Bach two books of the Preludes and Fugues. Now, in there, as I often refer to the example of the C minor fugue from the first book of the Preludes and Fugues: There's a problem which is treated there, by Bach, which then you will find later, in a much amplified version, in his works, such as the Musical Offering, or also a reflection of the same thing in the Art of the Fugue.

Now, if you really work through Bach, and re-live what he does, and the point is to--. First of all, what did he do? How does he use inversion? One of the great problems people have, is that musical training, today, makes a distinction between instrumental and vocal performance, and vocal music. For example, I have never heard what I consider a satisfactory of the Missa Solemnis of Beethoven. And it's not the fault of Beethoven. The point is, that the modern musicians are trained, in such a way that a sort of routine distinction is made, between instrumental performance, and vocal performance. And the training in the bel canto method of singing has dropped off, to the degree, that people don't know what good vocal performance is.

For example--and this is where this comes from: Go back to Pythagoras, or the question of the monochord versus the voice; if the human voice is trained to sing naturally, that is, if the most efficient potential of the human singing voice is utilized, then you will find that the voices break down into several adult species, each with a very distinct set of register cross-over shifts, in the quality of the voice. If you takes these conceptions, and organize the octave in terms of the singing voice, you will find there are certain peculiarities in the octave. This determines what Bach defined as a well-tempered system.

So therefore, if you situate this concept, as Bach did, within a well-tempered system, then, by using simple inversions, you create paradoxes, which generate whole families of harmonic development. And the work of, for example, the work of Beethoven's quartets, which I've referred to, for this purpose, a number of times, this is a work of genius beyond belief. And, the process of continuous, successive development, which reaches a kind of point of perfection with Beethoven's late string quartets, is an example of what you should want to do. But, I think that the way one does it, is by getting inside and re-living the way Bach uses a germ idea, a germ paradox, and enfolds the entire composition to a succession of steps, which also involve derived germ paradoxes, and brings it to a conclusion, which has a sense of completion.

So, the trick is not how to innovate. The Romantics innovate. Others innovate. Some of the Modernists innovate. But that is not really doing anything. The trick is to be able to learn to do what Bach did; to learn what Mozart did, especially after 1782, when he went to study with the Sunday salon in Vienna, where he worked through a lot of Bach's work, as well as Handel and others. And then, some of the later work of Haydn, from the same period, because Haydn was going to this same salon. And, then Beethoven, who was part of the same procedure.

And then, take the development of Schubert, which is a very interesting study, all in itself, from Schubert's younger works, and then, you find it in his later works, as a revolutionary improvement. He was already a precocious genius, as a child; but in his later period, he developed for major compositions, a new dimension of his thinking.

The work of Schumann. Some of the work of Mendelssohn, Felix Mendelssohn. And, the work, of course, of Brahms, particularly his later work, as the great continuer of the study of his predecessors.

To me, the mastery, from the inside--the inside--from the standpoint of performance orientation, of how do you start a composition, in its performance; capture the attention of the audience, at the first note. At which point, the audience's mind goes into the domain of the imagination, not the domain of sense perception as such. And then, as you reach the conclusion, the audience wakes up, and finally finds it has come back, from the realm of the imagination, in which it was living.

So, I think there's no mechanical shortcut to this. There are principles involved. They're all, in an elementary way, they're all presented in the two sets of books of Preludes and Fugues of Bach. And, if one, for simplicity, to solve problems, I would suggest people go back to those exercises, by Bach, to refresh themselves and clarify their own thinking, about what they're going to do.

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