The Beauty of the Diversity of Cultures
May 25—The following is a report on yesterday's Panel 2 of the Schiller Institute’s Conference, titled “The Beauty of the Diversity of Cultures.”
Jen Pearl, of the Schiller Institute, a singer and choral conductor, moderated the panel, opening with a video of the late statesman Lyndon LaRouche from 1995 on the motet “Jesu, Meine Freude” by J.S. Bach. LaRouche described his attendance at a rehearsal and later at a performance of the famous Thomanerchor (St. Thomas Choir of Leipzig), which has a history of more than 800 years, in which these students, ranging from 8 to 18, were trained in the performance of this very difficult motet of Bach, and then performed it to perfection.
Helga Zepp-LaRouche, Schiller Institute chairwoman then discussed why we need a new International Renaissance, beginning with the founding of the Schiller Institute in 1984, a moment of great danger (with a missile crisis between the NATO and the U.S.S.R.) in order to build a movement on the art of statecraft with a vision of making the state beautiful, requiring a new economic order and a new Renaissance for humanity as a whole. Today, this is happening in Asia, but the West is degenerating, with drugs, perversity, and a cult of ugliness. She raised Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov’s view that Western culture was rejecting the values of our ancestors, adopting a “post-Christian” culture of “anything goes,” and then trying to impose such a perverted culture on the rest of the world. That was the culture in which the unipolar world, the 20th century philosopher Francis Fukayama’s “End of History” and LGBTQ proliferated, and the “autocracy vs. democracy” fraud degrading all to the lowest denominator.
The question of how to uplift people in this condition is our task, as with the great minds of history, typified by Confucius and Friedrich Schiller, who argued that an aesthetical education was the bedrock of this necessary human process, uplifting the mind to the level of reason, making the senses rise to the level of the creative mind. They knew that great art lifts the soul, just as degraded ugliness degrades the soul. She remarked that Cai Yuanpei had studied the work of Schiller and took this notion back to China as the first Minister of Education under Sun Yat Sen in the last century.
Elvira Green, a former New York Metropolitan Opera soloist and a voice teacher, gave a powerful presentation on the power of music, beginning with the words from the spiritual “Lift Every Voice and Sing.” She talked of teaching children with the Mozart opera The Magic Flute (“Mozart’s love letter to children”) which describes music in the form of the “the Magic Flute” as having the power to overcome fire and ice (hatred and indifference). She quoted JFK on the power of culture, as that which defines and survives to eternity, rather than a nation's military feats. Green described how the great bair Roland Hayes winning over the hateful German crowd by personal calm and the beauty in his performance of Franz Schubert’s “Du bist die Ruh.” She asked if music had a color? Nor did justice, or truth have a color. It is ideas and beauty that move souls, and called on musicians to become the lawmakers is this troubled times.
Megan Dobrodt, the President of the Schiller Institute and a flute player, pointed out that, as Zepp-LaRouche had stated, a Renaissance doesn’t just happen, it is made by those who see that mankind is better than the current condition, and who create a new culture. Dobrodt is convinced that we are capable of creating a new Renaissance, which can be global for the first time due to advances in technology and communication.
What is “classical,” Dobrodt asked? It is not a period of history, as some silly musicologists state, but a universal principle of the mind. The senses can gather impressions, but it is the mind that finds causes, which is science. It is poetry which conveys concepts which are not expressible in prose, which conveys a thought-idea in a persons mind, while music does the same with greater force. Dobrodt quoted the great German conductor Wilhelm Furtwängler on J.S. Bach, connecting the here and now to eternity, drawing the mind to participate in creativity, for a dialogue of civilizations.
A series of musical presentations then captured these principles through beauty, to the joy of the audience. These included:
• Feride Istogu from Denmark, who sang two Albanian songs.
• Two Chinese singers, a mezzo-soprano and a tenor, who sang both Mozart arias (from The Abduction from the Seraglio and Clemenza di Tito) and several songs in Chinese, including a duet.
• A duo on a classical Iranian four-string instrument and a drum, who played a piece from 2,500 years ago.
• Everett Suttle, a tenor and one of the founders of the Schiller Institute chorus, sang a piece by Rachmaninoff in Russian and a song by a Portuguese composer named Jayme Rujas de Aragón y Ovalle, as well as a Brahms duet with the Schiller Institute’s soprano Michelle Erin, titled “Schwesterlein.”
The panel was closed by Schiller Institute conductor John Sigerson, who discussed role of the movement or motion in music, the movement between intervals, rather than the notes themselves, using Mozart’s motet “Ave Verum Corpus,” then noted that Lyndon LaRouche had called for a thousand-strong chorus, and that we had a good start for that with the audience in attendance. He proceeded to engage everyone to, first, study several intervals in the “Ave Verum,” and then to stand and sing the four-part “Ave Verum Corpus” themselves: A moving moment and a fitting conclusion to the panel. Helga Zepp-LaRouche added that the emotion produced in the audience is the type of response we must evoke in the population as a whole to bring them to a new paradigm of peace and progress.