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Toward a Renaissance of Classical Music and Science

Conference Program

The final panel of the April 13-14 New Paradigm conference of the Schiller Institute, held in Frankfurt, Germany April 14, was devoted to the question of reviving Classical culture. Coming the day after a magnificent Classical concert, the presentations and discussions served as a point of reflection upon that profoundly moving experience, as well as a discussion of the way forward.

The April 13 concert featured selections from operas by the great Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi, whose 200th birthday is being celebrated this year, and a performance of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Requiem Mass in D minor, by a largely amateur chorus of political activists with the Schiller Institute. All the music was performed at the "Verdi tuning" of A=432 Hz.

EIRNS/Christopher Lewis
The Schiller Institute Chorus and Orchestra, joined by several professionals, performs Mozart’s Requiem Mass, at the Verdi turning of A=432 Hz.

There were three parts to the final session. First, a presentation on "The Current World Crisis: Its Social Nature and Challenge to Social Science," by Andrey Fursov, a historian, and director of the Russian Studies Center at the Moscow University for the Humanities, Izborsk Club, Russia. The second part was a panel on "Aesthetical Education and Beauty," which was led by Helga Zepp-LaRouche. Her brief remarks were followed by similarly brief presentations by Italian opera singer Antonella Banaudi; the chairwoman of the Movimento Solidarietā (Movisol, the LaRouche movement in Italy) Liliana Gorini; and John Sigerson, the Schiller Institute music director in the United States. Thirdly, there was a discussion period and wrap-up statements by Helga and Lyndon LaRouche.

We present here the full remarks by Fursov, Zepp-LaRouche, and Banaudi, a summary of the presentations by Gorini and Sigerson, and the concluding discussion.

An Asymmetrical Answer To the British Empire

by Andrey Fursov

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EIRNS/Daniel-Enrico Grasenack-Tente
Andrey Fursov.

Mr. Fursov's speech was titled, "The Current World Crisis: Its Social Nature and Challenge to Social Science."

Dear Colleagues:

First of all, I would like to express my gratitude to the organizers of the conference, who invited me to speak here.

I would like to start my talk with a quotation from the quintessential British imperialist, Winston Churchill, who, in 1940, wrote in a letter, that "Great Britain was fighting not against Hitler, and not even against National Socialism, but against the spirit of the German people, against the spirit of Schiller, so that this spirit would never be reborn."

But now we are here, at a conference which was organized by the Schiller Institute, and it is our kind of asymmetrical answer to the British Empire. . . .

Crisis has become a code word of our time. But the question is-a crisis of what? We are told that it is a crisis of finance, it is a crisis of state, it is a crisis of education-so, it is a crisis of everything. But what does this mean, to be a crisis of everything? A crisis of everything means a systemic crisis. It is a crisis of the social system, and this social system is capitalism.

So, first, a crisis of capitalism, and only secondly, a crisis of civilization, mankind. But what is capitalism? Descartes used to say "define the sense of the words." My working definition is that capitalism is a complicated institutional system which limits capital in its own long-term and holistic interests, and ensures expansion in space, externalizing the crisis, and exploitation.

The last element is vital, because capitalism, like antiquity, like the slave system, is an expansively oriented system. When in the course of the evolution of capitalism, the global rate of profit was diminishing, capital used to carve out parts of known capital zones, and transform them into the capitalist periphery, the zone of raw materials extraction, and that of cheap labor. But in 1991, with the fall of the socialist camp, including the U.S.S.R., and with the start of semi-gangster type of capitalism in Russia, non-capitalist zones evaporated. Now capitalism is everywhere. It encompasses all the globe. Complete victory.

But every acquisition is a loss. Now there is no place to expand. Intensification of capitalism is the whole agenda. The problem is that capitalism is an extensively constructed system in principle. Several institutions-the nation state, civil society, politics, and mass education-limit capital's possibility to exploit the core of the system, in the way, or on the scale it does at the periphery. The institutions I have mentioned externalize exploitation, somewhat compared to the way Solon's reforms did in ancient Athens.

Lords of the Crisis Rings

I do not want to minimize the level of exploitation in the so-called highly developed countries, but there is a certain limit to it, or, to be more precise, there was in the period of 1945-1975. It is no coincidence that the French called this period "the glorious 30 years." I say "was," because since the 1980s, the dominant groups of the capitalist class have been dismantling these protected institutions, the sum, or rather the system of which, constitutes normal and sound capitalism, or its pillars.

During the last 30 years, we have been witnessing the fading away of nation-states, the squeezing of civil society, depoliticization of the political sphere, and deliberate primitivization and weakening of mass education, including higher education. In America, this process took place in the 1970s and '80s; in Russia, we are witnessing it now. But thanks to the socialist foundations, those who are trying to demolish our education are succeeding, but only partly. This liquidation is the essence of the so-called neo-liberal revolution, or rather, counter-revolution: counter not only to the main tendencies of the postwar 30 years, but also to the whole period of European history since the Renaissance.

It is not just a regression; it is counter-progress. It is deliberate counter-progress.

During the last 30 years, we have been living in crisis. And this crisis, the neo-liberal counter-revolution, is man-made; it is artificial, or it has been artificial, because it seems that at the beginning of the 21st Century, the crisis began to go out of control of its masters, of the "Lords of the Crisis Rings." We can identify this, indirectly, in the conflicts of different segments of the global elite, in the activities of their closed organizations, and in the statements of high functionaries.

Suffice it to recall what [IMF Managing Director] Christine Lagarde was saying in October in Tokyo, at the meeting of the IMF and World Bank, and what the essence of the report of the Morgan Stanley management in June of last year was.

The guiding document of the neo-liberal counter-revolution was the report "Crisis of Democracy," written at the request of the Trilateral Commission by Samuel P. Huntington, Brian J. Crozier, and Joji Watanuki, in 1975. The document is very interesting. The authors wrote that the only cure for the evils of democracy was not more democracy, but the moderation of democracy. The report argued that, for a democratic political system to function effectively, it usually required some measure of apathy and non-involvement on the part of some individuals and groups. They meant the middle class and upper groups of the working class.

The democratic surge, the report said, was a general challenge to existing systems of authority, public and private; and the main conclusion was that a diminution of public influence was needed. So, in fact, this document was a reaction to the rise of the middle class and working class, due to industrialization in the 30 postwar years. The solution was very simple: deindustrialization. The deindustrialization of the North Atlantic core, and an offensive against the middle class and working class. And we saw it in Thatcherism and Reaganomics.

Deindustrialization of the West, which began in the 1980s, ideologically has been under preparation for a long time, since the 1860s-1880s in Great Britain. In the 1950s and 1960s, the environmentalist movement was added to it. The environmentalist movement of the '60s was organized by the Rockefeller Foundation, and it was paving the way for future deindustrialization.

The same role was played by the youth culture and different minority movements, and, of course, by de-rationalization of thinking and behavior. The '80s saw the rise of irrational cults, the deterioration of mass education, and, of course, the supplanting of science fiction by fantasy. The Harry Potter series is a very indicative example, where we see the future, or a picture of reality, where there's no democracy, where there's a hierarchy, and where power is based on magic, not on rational choice.

The Project To Stop History

In fact, the neo-liberal counter-revolution, which organized the redistribution of incomes in favor of dominant groups, and at the expense of the middle class and working class, was part of a much greater geo-historic project, or plot, as you wish: the project to stop history. Because the redistribution of income, and de-democratization of society, demanded a civilizational U-turn, which I call the three Ds: de-industrialization, de-rationalization, and de-population.

This last plays an important role, not only from the economic point of view, or from the resource point of view. It is much easier to control 2 billion people than 7 or 8 billion. The de-population project is financed by the same structures which financed the ecology movement, etc.

The neoliberal counter-revolution was a crisis in itself, but it was intended to be a managed crisis. Yet, in the beginning of the 21st Century, the process seems to be going out of control, as I said; Hegel used to call such situations the perfidy of history.

So, we have a double crisis: one man-made and planned, and then, a new crisis, a chaotic one.

To deal with the crisis, one has to have will and reason, or rather, first, reason, to understand, and secondly, the will to put reason into action. In our case, reason is social science, but the problem is that social science, in its present condition, is not adequate to the challenges of our epoch. The main agent of social science is the expert, who knows more and more about less and less. And there is a de-theoretization of knowledge. Knowledge is becoming more and more empirical, statistical case studies without theory, without scientific imagination and so on.

First, the disciplinary net of the late 19th Century, which is our inheritance from the 19th Century-economy, sociology, and political science-in fact, doesn't capture social reality as a whole-only parts of it. The basic unit of analysis of sociology is civil society, but if that is shrinking, it means that sociology can tell us less and less about the world we are leaving and the world we are entering.

[The French historian] Fernand Braudel used to say: "Capitalism is the enemy of the market." Rather, capitalism is balanced between monopoly and market, but now we can see that transnational corporate monopolization is pushing the market away.

I would like to remind you about the research by Andy Coghlan and Debora MacKenzie, published in October 2011 on the site of the New Scientist. This group of scholars showed that 147 companies, 1% of all companies, controlled 40% of the world economy. This is very indicative. This means that the modern economy, whose basic unit of analysis is the market, conceals more than it shows. Politics and the nation-state are fading away, and this means that political science, with its basic units of analysis-politics and the state-not only cannot adequately conceptualize, but cannot even merely depict real power relations, especially on the global level.

Secondly, there is another serious problem with political science. Real power is usually secret or semi-secret, shadow power. Conventional political science has neither concepts nor methods, to analyze this type of power. The more democratic the facade of the western society was becoming in the 19th and 20th centuries, the less real power it had. This power was channeled into closed clubs, super-national structures, etc.

What I am saying is banal and trivial, but political science in its present condition cannot analyze real power relations. The integration of these structures as units of analysis in conventional political science will in fact blow it up.

Cognitive Intelligence Organizations

So, a new social science is needed, studying the real world, and not that which professed scholarship defines as real. A new social science with new disciplines, new concepts, a social force which will be able to create such a new type of scholarship, has the best chance to win in the 21st Century, or at least to undermine attempts to cut us off from our European legacy.

It is evident that a new scholarship can be created only by structures of a new type. Which organizations are analyzing reality today? Above all, these are scientific organizations and the analytical branches of secret services, but both are in deep crisis. Today, we are witnessing a crisis of both scientific organizations and secret services-their analytical branches. Scholarship appears not to be able to work with enormous volumes of information and feels awkward in analyzing informational streams. The gap between informational streams, including professional ones, and the standard level of a standard scholar is growing. Instead of scholars, as I said, we have experts who know more and more about less and less.

The whole picture reminds us of the situation of scholasticism at the end of the 15th Century: the miniaturization of research, case studies, and no universal lexicon among different spheres of knowledge. As for the analytical branches of the secret services, they seem to be unable to work in a world where almost all significant information can be found in open sources. And this transforms the whole business.

So, there is a need to create fundamentally new structures. I prefer to call them cognitive intelligence organizations. They must combine the best features of scholarship structures and those of the secret societies. Like the latter, they must analyze the real world, not the imaginary one, paying attention to certain indirect evidence. Social science usually neglects indirect evidence, which is, however, very important.

At the same time, like scholarship, they must concentrate on the laws and regularities of mass processes. Such structures must be not just analytical units, but also organizational weapons in the struggle for the future. I understand very well that it is much easier to pronounce such things, than really to create these organizations, but one must try.

Thank you.

Aesthetical Education And the Beautiful

by Helga Zepp-LaRouche


EIRNS/Christopher Lewis .
Helga Zepp-LaRouche

Helga Zepp-LaRouche opened the final panel discussion of the conference.

We will try to end on a beautiful note, which is the idea of Classical culture. I think yesterday evening, when we had the wonderful concert which integrated the professionals with the people who are in the learning process, and this indeed was so moving, that I think most of us who were there could not help to have tears in their eyes, and were carried away by a foretaste of what kind of a world would be possible, if this evil would not exist.

Now, I don't know if Bruce Fein1 is still here, but I have a standing controversy with him about the nature of man. And I would like my opening remarks, and also for the short discussion we could have [to address that]:

Obviously, if you look at the world today, it's full of evil, it's full of depravity, it is a systemic crisis as Mr. Fursov was just saying. But I think we should not be confused about what is the potential of mankind. And while we are in a Dark Age, I'm absolutely convinced that, if we just think about the development of the human species, which has been around only for a very short period of time. . .

Recorded history, in terms of writings, is barely 200 generations, which is like yesterday; and in that short period of time, the development of science and technology has been quite impressive: A stone which used to be used, some thousands of years ago to kill your neighbor, a Faustkeil [a stone axe with two faces], today, the size of the same instrument-you have an iPhone which has computer capability where you can run economies from around the world; you have conferences, you're absolutely, incredibly connected, and you can do all your work-now, this is only a short period of time.

Now, just think how mankind, if we make it, would look 1,000 years from now. In the same way that the developed person today says, "How ridiculous to use this stone to kill your neighbor; I now have the whole world in this little instrument!" Just think: In a thousand years from now, people will look back and say, "Ha-ha! These ridiculous people from 2013-they thought an iPhone was something special!" They will look at the iPhone as if it would be a Faustkeil.

So I think we should not be limited by the present condition of civilization, but have an idea that if we have this scientific and technological, and industrial reconstruction of the world, and combine that with a Classical education, the aesthetical education Schiller and others are talking about, why should we not be able to develop civilization in such a way, that in the future-okay, I mentioned four-year-old boys who kick you in the shins, I mean, that will probably always be like that, because children, especially little boys, tend to be uncontrollable monsters at a certain age! But then they grow up.

Getting Rid of Childhood Diseases

My vision of the future of civilization is that we get rid of these childhood diseases, like all the emotions which go along with globalization. And just imagine if every child on the planet would have universal education, would have parents who would be concerned about the creative potential of the children to be developed. Why should that not be possible? I think the Age of Reason which Schiller was talking about is not a utopia.

But I think that we are in a transition phase, where, if we create the new paradigm, we have a future of civilization, where people have their identity as scientists, creative composers, poets, engineers, teachers, parents-a completely different identity, devoted to the progression of civilization. I think that is the true identity of mankind, if we are going to make it as a civilization.

So, I think we have the incredible responsibility of making that transition, to leave this world of what I would really like to call "oligarchical childhood diseases" behind us. And in a certain sense, there will never be a second Beethoven, there will be never a second Schiller, but in the realm of creativity, the degrees of freedom are limitless. And I think we should have this idea of mankind becoming a truly creative species, where the majority of people will be creative, and not slaves!

So, that is something to work for and to fight for, and I think that great Classical art is really the way to get there. And therefore, I want to give the word now to Antonella [Banaudi].

Beauty Is the Language Of the Universe

by Antonella Banaudi

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EIRNS/Daniel-Enrico Grasenack-Tente
Antonella Banaudi

Helga and Lyn gave me this chance to talk to you, a chance to open my mind and my heart, and maybe this can help you, if I say something interesting, but for sure, it will be helpful for me. Because trying to be clear in my mind will help me.

I was thinking this over the last two days: that the reality of the human experience on the planet Earth is incredibly limited, in terms of space, time, and any other parameters with which the concept of life can be expressed. Man is not so much a terrestrial being, with an eternal or universal part, a soul; rather, man is a creative fantasy of the universe, a momentary manifestation of its power of invention. So the great mind of the universe experiments with itself through man. We are eternity incarnated, in this moment, imprisoned in a small material reality.

Perhaps I can imagine that the human eventually occupies the time of a snap of the fingers in the mind of God. And in our mind, we still have the echo of that snap.

Our human senses can be compared to our small Earthly reality, and most people live their experience on Earth only through the senses. Their Earthly life becomes the only reason for their existence, without being able or willing to really see, to really listen, to really feel, and to really understand how to be something, to be a protagonist in the universe.

Life that is linked to the senses only, is a life with no sense of purpose. It's like living in the entrance hall of a wonderful, marvelous castle, marvelous palace. So the most important senses for a man are the interior senses. And through art, through the exterior senses, the interior ones develop. Only the intellectual senses allow us to discover the power, the greatness, the wonder of the human creature, and how we can be protagonists in the universe.

The intellectual senses form a clear mind that can receive from eternity, a mind that has intuition, that is open, projected, like a ray of energy, toward something that is infinite, and to break through the darkness of ignorance. Because it is ignorance that can make us imprisoned on this Earth. So, we don't need a dream-because you dream in the night. We need a vision, we need to see, to foresee something that can be, and not in the future, but now.

So, no act of true art or true science exists, or is done, only for here, and only for now. Only true art or true science have in themselves the vision of something that surpasses time and space, that contains the intuition of the architecture of the universe, and how all of us, and everything, is an incarnation of the universe.

To me, to be able to conceive the Absolute, is what can get us free from now, and here [holds up an iPhone]: This is useful, but this is style, this is design, but this is not beauty. If we think that this object is true science, is true art, we misunderstand. Because this doesn't contain eternity, or something that is valuable.

The Power of Mozart

I would like to say something else: that music, for me-a musician is like a time machine, not in the sense that when I perform music, and am performing something that is from 200 years ago, 20 years ago, it's not in that sense. It's in the sense that using time, and sounds that are happening at the time, from the here and now, I can travel into a place where there is no time, and also is nowhere and everywhere at the same time.

If I listen to a piece of music, or a musician, that is not able to take me somewhere else, into a place that is not here and now, I have a sense that that music is not great music, or that it is not Classical music-it's not done in a good way, in a beautiful way.

Maybe you remember a movie, for me a great movie, the "Shawshank Redemption"-and how the music of Mozart was used to uplift the prisoners in the yard of the prison. So there were two voices-because it was the duet from the "Nozze di Figaro," "Sull'aria," "Che soave zeffiretto." There were these two voices coming from the realm of beauty, and they were, to me, like two birds, wonderful birds, but they were playing in the air, dancing, designing, continuously, and entering the heart of every prisoner, and opening their heart, and giving hope, and enlightening their minds, and letting them enter, really, into another realm.

Because in this realm, you don't need to understand words. You don't need to understand Italian, or German, or whatever, because when your mind is really in contact with the mind of the universe, it's really speaking the same language. And I hope, for myself, as a person, as a musician, to have, as sometimes I have had, this sense of contact of similarity of my mind, of my imagination, with the imagination of the universe. I can also say, the imagination of God.

So, I wish for myself to find even more of this connection, and I wish for all of us, to have this feeling that we are speaking in our mind, in the same language of the universe, that this language of beauty is the language of something that is eternal, and that you can recreate every moment you make something beautiful. I wish this.

The Fight for Classical Music

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EIRNS/Christopher Lewis
John Sigerson.
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Schiller Institute videograb
Liliana Gorini.

The final presentations on this panel were given by two longtime leaders of the Schiller Institute's music work, who reflected on their own work and discoveries in the promotion of Classical music.

John Sigerson took up the question of the central role of irony, or metaphor, which lies at the core of true Classical music. He referred to his personal work on Schumann's Lieder cycle, Dichterliebe, which he sang many years ago in New York City. A week later, Lyndon LaRouche wrote a memo that shocked me, he said. In the memo, Lyn wrote that Dichterliebe is a rip-roaringly funny piece. That made me think a lot about how to bring out the point of irony in Classical music, he said, as reflected, for example, in the song "Ich grolle nicht" ("I bear no grudge") which, in fact, conveys exactly the opposite.

Getting to beauty through paradoxes, which are resolved by going to a higher level of thought-that is the aim of the Classical composer, Sigerson said. It is also a parallel, in some sense, to what we are doing in the fight for FDR's Glass-Steagall, where we are taking the best created by previous generations, and raising it to a new level, to resolve the crisis of mankind. As Mozart puts it in an especially beautiful section of the Requiem, the "Recordare": "Tantus labor non sit cassus" ("Let not all this work be in vain").

Liliana Gorini, a leader of the LaRouche movement in Italy, recounted for the audience the fight that LaRouche initiated in 1987, to return to the lower Classical tuning of C=256. It began with a performance of Mozart's "Coronation Mass" by the U.S. Schiller Institute chorus in 1987, and she had the opportunity to be in the U.S. and be part of the project. Lyn told the bassoon players, "Put Scotch tape on your instruments. Respect the voice and the connection between music and science."

When she returned to Milan, she decided to investigate whether Giuseppe Verdi had said something about tuning-and found the letter from Verdi to the government in 1884, in which he also connected science and music, and demanded a law for the scientific tuning of A=432 Hz. The Schiller Institute, in 1988, organized a conference at the Casa Verdi in Milan for the scientific tuning. Gorini showed a videoclip of the famous baritone Piero Cappuccilli demonstrating what a difference the tuning makes, by singing selections from two arias-one from "Trovatore," the other from "Ernani"-with two pianos, one tuned high, the other tuned scientifically.

During the concert on the evening of April 13, Gorini had delivered a message of support for the conference concert in Verdi tuning from Carlo Bergonzi, the world famous Verdi tenor, with a 50-year career, and one of the many signers of the Schiller Institute's international call for scientific tuning. Both, Bergonzi and Cappuccilli had participated in a conference in Verdi's home town of Busseto in November 1996, in which also Lyn and Helga participated.

Gorini expressed the hope that more concerts in the scientific tuning will be organized by others around the world this year, to celebrate the bicentennial of Verdi's birth on Oct. 10, 1813. The campaign is still going on! During his lifetime, Verdi was also concerned with a return to the Classical authors like Shakespeare and Schiller, whose works he studied and used in his operas. He said, if we go back to them, we will have progress.

Gorini concluded: It is through Classical art that people can be uplifted to overcome their personal flaws, and accomplish the mission of serving humanity.

Dialogue with Lyndon & Helga LaRouche

Finding an Identity In the Future

A brief discussion period, moderated by Helga Zepp-LaRouche, brought the conference to a close.

Helga Zepp-LaRouche: One of the violinists from the performance yesterday, who is also a student of Norbert Brainin, has put up a new petition [on the Internet] for the lower tuning. We will publish the address on the Schiller New Paradigm website, and I would ask all of you help to make it known, and what it involves.

Since I have heard that there were many questions in the room, which it would be impossible to answer now because of time reasons, people should feel encouraged to send these questions by e-mail, or even set up some kind of telephone conference call, because I think some of the speakers would be more than happy to answer questions even beyond this short opportunity.

I would say we now have about ten minutes, so if people have pressing issues for any of the speakers on the podium, please go ahead.

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EIRNS/Julien Lemaître
Helga LaRouche, and her husband Lyndon, the “Confucian mentor.”

Q: Hello, my name is Matthias and I have a simple question to Lyn for my future work. Please tell me how can I motivate my friends to take responsibility for people they will never know? How can I get the people around me to be more involved to work for the future?

Lyndon LaRouche: Well, first of all, you have to be convinced yourself. You have to define your own self-confidence, and you really have to decide to make a breakthrough that is not the same-old, same-old.

No, it depends upon you: First of all, you have to have a reason, a motivation for experiencing something yourself, and it's on the basis of wishing to express that for yourself. And it can come in two ways: You wish to express something which is in you, and you find that when you try to do that, you stumble. And then, if you get help, you find, if you're cooperating with somebody, and you try to do the same thing, as in song, you find it may work. So you actually have to do-experimentally, you're exploring yourself, and trying to find out where the fault in yourself is, which prevents you from doing something. Or, maybe it's a physical problem of performance; but you have to settle the question, yourself.

And if you can solve the problem, solve it! If you can't solve it, try doing something indirect on the problem; promote it, getting other people to do it, getting people to agree, "Let's try to do this; I'm having trouble doing this. Let's try to do this."

And I think a lot of inspiration-the greatest performers-I think they often get to it exactly that way, by getting to something when, suddenly, they make a breakthrough. And only when you to through this challenge of making a breakthrough, do you really understand what it's all about. It's that understanding.

What Is Real Classical Art?

Q: Hello, I have, I think, a simple question, but to whoever wants to respond, how do you recognize what is real Classical art, and what is not?

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Beethoven composed his sublime music, and conducted his compositions, while deaf! He was able to do this because he operated in the domain of ideas, and not of the senses, LaRouche said.

LaRouche: There's a good example of this. It's the case of Beethoven in his later years, and it's a humiliating lesson for people who have difficulty in singing; it's a terrible lesson. Because Beethoven was at a point where he was composing, where he could not rely upon his ability to hear. He couldn't rely on it. But he actually composed-his greatest compositions, in complexity and achievement, came in his later performances, at a time when he could no longer hear! He would direct a performance, a public performance, which he himself could not hear! And do it accurately.

And the point is, it is not the sound of your voice which isn't much; it is the sound inside your head which is it. The idea, you operate in the domain of ideas, not of experimental noises. Not trying to find a beautiful noise. It's something inside you, it's a passion inside you, to do something you have never done before, an accomplishment you never made before! And it's only when people go through that, and some teacher or some coach, for example, will get them-"Look! Try!"

And, when they make a breakthrough, of finding out how to do something which they were always capable of doing potentially, and they make that breakthrough, and they force themselves to dare to make that breakthrough-they may not do it too well, but then, they know what they've got. And they will try again, and it will become successful

'The Sweetness of Truth'

Q: Hello, I want to speak in German. [Asks question in German]

Zepp-LaRouche: Okay, I'll answer in English.

I think that everybody who joined this movement was confronted with this problem, because what my husband has done is basically to lift us out of a life which was more or less a normal life: People would pursue their studies, or their family life, or whatever. And I apologize that I say this, because I'm not prejudiced because I'm married to him, but you meet a person like my husband, maybe once a century. And I was very happy when the guest from China said that Lyn is "a Confucian mentor"; and other people have said, he's in the tradition of Vernadsky in Russia, or. . .

Anyway, when we met him, it was like an earthquake, a thunderstorm, which completely changed the way you look at [the world]. Because if you meet a Plato, or you meet a Leibniz, or a Beethoven, I think that that changes your life.

Now, in the beginning there were incredible obstacles. People said, "Oh, you want to do this crazy thing? Don't think you can change history. You're just a little Sandkorn [grain of sand] on the ocean, the waves will come and push you away. And it takes this initial strength, to say, "No, I will devote my life to something better." Given the fact that anybody who has a heart and a mind, and who sees in what terrible condition this civilization is-I mean, Africa is dying: Who cares about Africa? You have millions of children dying and nobody cares! At least not in the so-called "advanced sector."

You have an incredible menticide going on: If you look at the youth, for me-even if I've been in politics with my whole heart for a very, very long time-when I see the condition of the youth, now, where you have reports almost every day that 12-year-olds are raping 11-year-olds, and they're making pornographic videos and put them on the Internet; or they use guns, when 4-year-olds shoot their parents, because the gun is lying around-I cannot look at the condition of civilization, knowing what is a positive image of man!

Fortunately, I had the luck that I had three good German teachers who never spoke about the 20th Century, but they always spoke about Schiller, Lessing, Möricke, and all these other beautiful poets, so my image was extremely formed by-for example, if you read the letter exchanges between Schiller and Humboldt, Schiller and Körner, Schiller and Goethe, for that matter, you see how a human relationship can be: that human beings can struggle for the most beautiful ideas, and that is the basis of their social relationship!

Now, if I compare these letter exchanges from this period to the SMS of today, or the Twitter of today, you have a sense of how much man has shrunk in their communication! And I think it's one of the big curses, that in the future, historians will ask, what was the relationship among these people? Oh, this SMS, and that text message. . .! And you know, it will be a mirror of why we are in such a Dark Age.

So, when you see all of that, and you have a love for mankind, then you have to have a compassion, that you will do everything with your life possible, to not leave it like that. Most children have no chance! If they don't meet at least one individual, a teacher, a parent, who gives this divine spark to them, they will become vegetables, and take drugs, and be involved in this horrible youth culture, which is based on ugliness, on violence, and so forth.

So if you have any passion for mankind, you have to do what we do-there is simply no other way. And in the beginning, you will meet some friends, who will turn out not to be friends. Many people think friendship is friendship, but then it turns out, when the first test comes, they were just "warm bodies in the Winter night." Or people you do banal things with, and when the first challenge comes, it's not a real friendship.

On the other side, those of us who stuck with it-and some of us are in this for a very long time-we are now appreciated by our parents, as the only ones who are not black sheep! Because all the others are divorced or have many symptoms of the present culture.

So this is a transformation; you have to have a little patience, because afterwards, people appreciate you for what you had the vision to show them. And those who are valuable will be with you, and those who are not valuable, you lose. That's the price, but I think the prize to be gained is what Nicholas of Cusa called "the sweetness of truth" which is much sweeter than any other thing you can know.

And since we are-really-we have a tremendous responsibility. I think that the few on the planet who really understand where civilization is at, they have a tremendous responsibility, because we are on the verge of extinction of civilization. And we are the few people, relatively speaking, who have knowledge of how it works, because we have never given up; whenever we were attacked, we did not capitulate like other people, but we said, "Who's attacking us? Why? Let's find out." And that's how we have one of the best private intelligence capabilities of anybody.

And that is why, in a certain sense, we are feared, despite the fact that we have no physical power. We have no large amounts of money; we have only the insight into the laws of the universe. And I think that that is why I am optimistic after all these many struggles, that the laws of the universe are with us, and they're with us for the same reasons that Antonella [Banaudi] said, because I believe that, while I cannot guarantee this or that, we are in tune with the lawfulness of the universe, and our opponents are a disease which will eventually vanish.

So, be optimistic and join.

Q: Yes, maybe you want to say something on what we are going to do tomorrow. Because we have also, our youth movement, we have people here who are partly working with us, who are new people, who have known us for a long time, but we need really to defend our citizenship, of our nations. And, we can very quickly establish that we contact our parliamentarians, and I think, for example, we have now in the United States, we have this fantastic [conference] call with organizers; and we also have that in Germany every Saturday, and every German can get on this call. We brief you and we can help you to actually organize the parliamentarian in your district. Because it's very urgent right now that Glass-Steagall go through. And I think it's very important to see this as the preparation for what we're going to do tomorrow.

So I just wanted to add that. And you can probably say more.

Cease Having Confidence in the Past

Zepp-LaRouche: I want to give the concluding word to Lyn.

LaRouche: The thing I desire the most, from all of you, and many people beyond, is to cease having confidence in what happened yesterday. The only thing that is really worthwhile, is, when you know you are living in a troubled universe, anyway, you know that you cannot continue to do what you are doing, because what you are doing is leading nowhere.

Therefore, the solution lies in the definition of the question of future: Do you know a better future? Now, this is not merely a matter of choice of choosing a future; you have to be right. It would be a terrible thing to make a mistake. And what's your passion to know what the true future potential is?

Take the case of Beethoven, as I referred to earlier, today: Beethoven was deafened to a degree, at which, in his last public performances, direction of his own compositions, he had trouble in matching what the orchestra was doing with his own composition. And yet he was right! And the reason was, that this man was composing brilliantly, in terms of composition of ideas, composition of ideas-he was at the acme of his capability, and still inspiring people. And yet, he could not hear! And yet, he had been deaf, for years. And his past ability to hear was disappearing all along. And yet, in this precise period, this man, this man's mind, was doing the greatest creation, greater than what he had ever done before.

Therefore, the thing that's important about human beings, and what's bad about them in their performance, is they believe in sense-perception. They believe in the sense-perception that has been heard, or the sense-perception they wish to hear, immediately, forgetting, recklessly, without finding what the actual future might be.

The most precious thing in society, is the development of people in society, who have a prescience of the future, of what the present is leading to-that you don't see the present only. You see the process of the past, leading into the present; now, can you know what the future is going to bring?

I've done this repeatedly. Other people, who are usually exceptional people, have done the same thing: I've often said, and been right, when I said, "five years from now is about the limit before this new development is going to occur." It could be more or less, but it's in those kinds of ranges. I've often prophesied, in the sense of ranges, and have been right.

Norbert Brainin: An Immortal Teacher
On Sept. 20-22, 1995, the Schiller Institute sponsored a series of seminars/master classes, featuring Lyndon LaRouche’s close friend and collaborator Norbert Brainin (1923-2005), the first violinist of the legendary Amadeus Quartet. The seminars, held at the DolnáKrupá castle in Slovakia, trace the revolution, begun by Hadyn’s discovery of Motivführung, through the works of Mozart and Beethoven. The 40-minute LPAC video is a montage from the seminar; the full videos can be found at: http://schillerinstitute.org/music/
1995/brainin_demo.html
.

Now, this is the same principle that you see demonstrated by all great composers. All great composers. The principle is to see the future, by seeing a better quality of idea, of importance of the idea in the future, at a relatively greater distance.

This is most essential, because otherwise, how can you judge what you can do with your life, or do for humanity during your life? How can you prove that that choice was not a waste of time? That your whole life is not a waste of time, because you didn't know the idea you should have been able to know? And that's what makes all creativity.

If you really understood Shakespeare's performances in drama, a good performance of Shakespeare, you come into the same thing. You realize that you are gradually foreseeing the future development within that drama. All great musical opera, Classical opera, the same thing; Classical song, the same thing. The opera is useful for this process, because it does involve a lapse of time. Can you foresee the irony of what's going to happen in the future in that drama, in the Classical drama? Can you apply that ability to a real life experience?

I'm telling you, man is perfectly capable of doing that. It's a species capability of a human being. It's what makes the difference between a human being and a beast. And you all have possession of it. You simply have to take charge of your possession.

Zepp-LaRouche: So, with that, this Schiller conference is concluded.

1. Bruce Fein spoke on "The Foundation of Civilization." His speech was published in EIR, April 17, 2013.