Question: Hi, I'm a student at City College in New York City. I'm a music student, but actually I was playing music long before that, because we had a piano at home, so I just had time to learn myself. So, I entered college already having my own ideas about what music was. And I became very sort of jaded in college, because not many professors really ever talked about what music was, and I thought that was never answered. So, I was always at the bottom of my class, and I had to keep repeating Music Theory. [Lyn: Hmm!]

At some point I began hearing about perfect pitch, and people recognizing notes just by hearing them, and naming them. And I realized, that when I listened, there really are different notes feel different, and you can tell, and it's so simple. So, anyway, I began to practice this, and study and work on my perfect pitch. I was getting better at it, and started reading about other people that did it, and I started to realize that I could actually show and teach other people, and that it's not so hard. But, when I mentioned this to professors, they were actually really threatened by it, and I was really attacked for claiming that I could teach anybody a perfect pitch.

Anyway, I've always been interested in teaching music completely differently, because it never worked for me, how it was done. And, again, one of my big things is, I'm convinced that I can teach anyone how to recognize pitches. Insofar as I can teach anyone to play an instrument, it all takes work.

My point is, whenever I mentioned perfect pitch to professors, how quickly they just dismissed it, and said, "well, some people are just born with it" or "maybe, if you learned it as a child, it wouldn't be so hard to learn it." I just kept thinking, "What a wonderful way to not have to ever actually bother to learn it, or change the way that person actually thought about music," and these were, like, really talented people in the theater, and Classical pianists. And, I was treated very badly and attacked [Lyn chuckles].

Anyway, my question is, how do you suggest going about the teaching of music? How often should it be taught in schools? Should it be taught sort of yearly, as with any science? And what is music's place in education?

LaRouche: Well, this is a very common problem. Obviously, you were doing sight-reading as a child. Instrumental sight-reading often creates problems, and the more facile you become at instrumental sight-reading, the more acute the problem may tend to become.

First of all music is not instrumental. Music is based on the human singing voice. And the human singing voice--perfect pitch, so-called, that's questionable, because sometimes you have induced a sense of perfect pitch, which you remember, but that may not be the right one. So, what's the right pitch? That means that you have to have a sense of, how would you derive the proper pitch?

Now, we have book, a manual, and you have a young lady here, who was exposed that manual and similar things, who studied voice. And she can also do other things, because she studied voice. And you have a young gentleman over here, who also had a similar exposure, and can also do the same thing.

Now, what is music? Well, first of all, music is human, it's not instrumental. You wouldn't try to impregnate a woman with a musical instrument, would you? [laughter] I'm not recommending that you conduct these experiments! I'm just pointing out to you a hypothetical experiment.

Now, Jenny did this with some others, at a recent conference: A demonstration of a very famous description of an experiment--not the actual description by the author of the experiment, Pythagoras, but the description we have passed down, of where Pythagoras's students reported, that what Pythagoras did, to define a magnitude, which is not a simple arithmetic magnitude, called a "comma." And, what he did, is, he compared a monochord, a simple string, which you can tune by dividing the string, by putting your fingers on at various points, with a human singing voice; and compared how certain intervals, by the singing voice, would produce a different result than on the monochord, the simple string. This difference is called a "comma."

This is not a quantity, a fixed quantity. It's a relative quantity, which is defined by the human singing voice. Which is not exactly precise. But, the human singing voice also has other characteristics, different than the so-called "instrumental music." It also has register shifts. And this defines six basic types of voices, and other coloration characteristics of voices, which is what you have in the Classical singing repertoire.

The problem is, today, we don't have a Classical singing repertoire--No. 1; No. 2, the accepted concert pitch, or standard pitch, which is rising, is false. Thirdly, as in the case of every attempt I've heard to perform the Missa Solemnis of Beethoven, no competent performance have I ever heard. Sometimes, the chorus is fine, but the instrumental part makes a mess of it. Because the chorus and the instruments are produced separately. And, Beethoven, in that period of life, had gone through, in a sense, a revolutionary advancement in his ability to compose, as typified by the late String Quartets. And therefore, he's using techniques, such that, if you don't do the right thing, the performance can not work.

Why? What you have to do, with a musical instrument, is, you have to with a musical instrument, is you have to start with the human singing voice, and make the instrument sing. One of the most famous cases of this, first of all, is the violin: Very simple. The violinist causes the instrument to produce the required singing tone value: human voice singing tone value. In the case of the oboe, the oboist essentially sings the characteristic tone into the oboe. And oboists who can not perform adequately, don't sing!

The basic problem of musical education, today, is, the instrumentalist doesn't know what music is. They learn to play with their instrument, not with their voice. Whereas the function of Classical music, essentially, is to produce a chorus of human singing, and human-singing-directed instrumental parts, to produce true counterpoint; which forces a certain kind of idea, a social relationship, which does not exist, shall we say, in mathematical physics. The relationship among the performers, is a social relationship. The relationship among the performers, as defined by voice part, by essentially counterpoint--the instruments as such, are supposed to play voice parts--human singing voice parts.

Now, how, therefore, do you develop a pitch? Well, the range of pitch, of the human singing voice, as you can adduce from Bach's composition for the cases of the combined chorus and instruments, that, in order for these things to be sung, by actual human voices of that range--like children and so forth--to have this done it has to fit within a certain range, which defines, together with the register shifts, defines a natural way of division of the scale. And that would be a perfect pitch.

Now, how is it arrived at? It's not arrived at, by memorizing a pitch. It's arrived at, by generating a sense of the right pitch. So, that would be a perfect pitch. What you're trying to do, what you described, is interesting, because obviously, the problem you were addressing was the problem of how to get past a sight-reading interpretation of the score, where the keyboard is doing the work for you, and all you're doing is reading the keyboard.

But the problem is, with that kind of performance, is, you are playing notes, not the music! And the notes are not the music. The notes are only notes. They are shadows of music. What you have to do, as a performer, is you have to re-create the idea, which the notes correspond to, in the mind of the composer, or what you think is in the mind of the composer. And you have to produce what the composer intended, not what the notes dictate you play.  This was called by Furtwaengler, who was the most famous and most effective conductor of the 20th Century, "playing between the notes." There's a slight shading of difference, which involved the concept of the comma, in which the contrapuntal structure determines how you should re-create the experience. And, the objective is, with a Classical work, is to be able to produce that work, in your mind to a single thought. In other words, the performer must have the whole composition implicitly in mind, as a single thought. It's like the identity of a face, the identity of a person: a single thought. You have to know that composition so well, that by thinking that single thought, you will generate the composition. And you do that, by going backwards, by reading the notes, not as notes, but as the shadow of the idea of a compositional process. You have that experience in your mind, and now you can reproduce it.

And, that is the way music has to be taught. That's why the original idea of children's choruses, like you have the famous Thomanerchor--this Thomasschule in Leipzig, which has been going, for hundreds of years; of teaching boys to sing, essentially, bel canto. Bach was once a director of that Thomasschule, hmm? And, this technique, was the technique that Bach used, in the early 18th Century. He developed and perfected it. And, it was done by boys' singing, in this kind of school. And learning the ABCs.

What would they sing? The boys, for example, at the Thomasschule, every week, on Friday evening, the boys deliver a Bach performance. They rehearse that, during the week, starting with Monday through Wednesday. And they perform it on Friday evening vespers. Hmm? I sat through one of these sessions, with the training sessions, and then heard the performance of Jesu meine Freude, on the following Friday evening. This is the way they worked.

So, what came out of there: You had boys, who would go through the voice training, before the voice change. Then they would take a break, for a year or two, when the male voice-change occurs, and then they would go back as the "young men"--they'd call them the "young men," right after the voice-change, when the tenors and baritones and basses would begin to show. And, they would perform these works together. It was very intense.

But, this is the real school. And, what's happened today, we don’t have something like a Thomasschule, any more, as a kind of institution, which is producing young singers of the type--for example: Where does Schubert, who was one of the greatest composers of all time; he died, unfortunately, young, but he was a brilliant composer of string quartets as a boy. He was trained in this way, in Vienna. All of the greatest musicians were trained in a similar way. In boyhood, they developed these qualities, developed these insights. And some of them went on to become better at it, than others. But the basic school, in modern development, from the 18th Century on, was Bach. All great music and all great performance, is rooted in the conception of the well-tempered system, defined by Bach.

Unfortunately today, the music which is given as repertoire, in conservatories and so forth, is garbage. Popular music is garbage. There's some folk song which has validity, but that's highly perfected, like the Negro Spiritual, which is a highly developed form of folk song, and was developed, actually, by great singers, as this, in the end of the 19th Century and the beginning of the 20th Century.

But in general, what is performed as music today, is garbage. It fills your ears. The Romantics, the Modernists: It's garbage. Keep away from it; it's deadly, it's immoral; it's Satanic, even. Keep away from it.

So, the problem is, we don't have an institutionalized quality of music, of the type that Europe once developed, which is typically true in Italian, and in German. The best training in music, comes from the bel canto singing programs in Italian and German--the models for singing. And, this is lacking. But, you can get an approximation of that, by studying this history, and studying the content of the history. And, then, by simply thinking about it, as I have summarily described it.

And another pitch beyond what you just described, is to go to the human singing voice, look at instrumental work from the standpoint of the human singing voice; how the human singing voice defines what instrumental music should be; how it should be approached. And then, you will get a sense of perfect pitch, not because you memorized perfect pitch, as someone has assigned it to you on a table, but because you have generated, in your own mind, what a proper pitch is. And you have to really stick to it. And this means that people will do warm-ups virtually every day. And the way it is perfected is, the singers do warm-ups, which are vocal training, every day. And it keeps their voice in shape, they speak more clearly; you can actually understand them--as opposed to many people today, who you hear on the streets, and so forth; it's good for organizing on the streets, because people can understand you! Which greatly improves the power of communication.

So, that's what I would make on the general question, which may be important to you, as well as to other people: Is, this is the way. We wrote this manual--which is not complete; it's only the first volume of what we had intended--but, this manual laid this thing out, or laid out some of the essentials of it. And, it is knowledgeable. But, there's no formal knowledge which will work, without actually going through the experience, of transforming the shadow of the printed text and score, into the actual idea of the performance.

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