January 18, 1980

NEW SOLIDARITY Page 7

Anno Hellenbroich: Educating Tomorrow's

Composers in Beethoven's Method
by Claudia Lee Annis

Above, Anno Hellenbroich. Below, members of the Humanist Academy youth

chorus perform a canon at the International Caucus of Labor Committees
year-end conference in Detroit.

The first international conference of the International Caucus of Labor

Committees, held in Detroit Dec. 28-30, 1979, devoted an entire day to the
task of creating generations of geniuses. The three presentations of that day
focused on music, geometry, and classical studies as means for teaching
Platonic method. What follows is an account of International Executive
Committee member Anno Hellenbroich's presentation on "Educating
Tomorrow's Composers in the Method of Beethoven.''
The Political Nature of Music
Hellenbroich began by describing the hysterical attacks on the Labor
Committees' epistemology which have appeared (both veiled and covert) in
the New York Times, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Stern magazine, and
other press, in response to the organization's advancing theoretical and
programmatic work in music. Labor Committee founder Lyndon LaRouche
has been slandered in the same fashion and by the same circles who smeared
the great German conductor Wilhelm Furtwngler as a Nazi in the 1930s and
1940s.
Hellenbroich demonstrated that the basis of the attacks against Furtwngler
had nothing to do with Nazism: he was attacked as early as 1926 in the New
York Times for what he was doing in music; the "Nazi'' slanders followed
years later.
To illustrate the vicious, mind-destroying Aristotelian approach to education
which he proposed to replace, Hellenbroich pointed to an article on child
musical prodigies which had appeared in a recent Sunday New York Times
magazine. The article cited Noam Chomsky's approachwhich considers
the mind a series of computer-like "organs'' which perform various separate
functions such as face recognition, language, etc.as the basis for educating
the "wunderkind." Presumably a child prodigy is one whose mind has an
excellent "computational'' function in a given area, and can simply be
"programmed" more quickly. Thus, said Hellenbroich, children singled out
as musical prodigies and trained according to this Aristotelian standpoint
tend to grow up thinking they are extensions of their musical instruments,
lacking a sense of themselves as human beings. Lacking an emotional
undercurrent (save what is "programmed'' into them as synthetic images),
many such child prodigiesespecially those in music"burn out" by the
age of 16 or 17.

Hellenbroich then cited an account by Yehudi Menuhin of how young

violinists or extraordinary technique, but without the needed emotional
maturity, have been made to produce a more "voluptuous" (sic) tone by
feeding them images of, for example, Cleopatra and her handmaidens
floating down the Nile, nibbling on delicious fruits!
The New York Times obscenity, published shortly after the Labor Committees' release of "How to Teach Beethoven to the American Layman" (in the
Campaigner), underlines the political nature of the 2,000-year fight between
Aristotelian and Neoplatonic factions to establish hegemony over music.
The fight included a continuing dispute over well-tempering. Hellenbroich
used tapes to demonstrate how polyphonic music played on an English organ
(traditionally equal-tempered, not well-tempered) sounds not only out-oftune but practically incomprehensible, except as a series of "sounds." Would
anyone notice the difference, though, if they had been educated along the
lines of Aristotelians such as Karl Orff or Zoltan Kodaly, to hear music as
mere tonal impulses, or the equivalent of animal sounds?
A Pathway Through Music
Why is it necessary to look into the well-tempered system for the purpose of
music education?
Hellenbroich explained that well-tempering was developed as a system in
which you could lawfully move through the entire universe of music, using
the diatonic scale as a pathway and such nodal points as "leading tones" (the
ascending half-step interval which suggests to the listener that the second
note played is "do") as bridges to move lawfully from one tonal "region" to
another, using the "circle of fifths" as a map. This system can be rapidly
taught to young children, as demonstrated by experiments with children of
Labor Committee members. It then becomes the basis for a child's early
grasp of the connection of freedom and lawfulness, as opposed to the
anarchist, infantile notion of "freedom vs. necessity." This discovery that
freedom means the ability to create within a lawful universe and thus
enhance, develop the laws, is a crucial step towards a child's discovery that
his mind is capable of understanding anythingthe self-conception of a
genius which, as LaRouche had noted the previous day, is the necessary
basis for becoming a genius.
For this sort of education to be universal, said Hellenbroich, we must have a
culture in which tonal relations are taught and understood, in which the

greater part of the population can soak up the conceptions behind music.
The social framework for this must be a new musical system, a large-scale
version of the musical system that once existed in Germanywhere every
town or village had its orchestra, and their finest musicians were sent to the
cities, and so on. It was this system that produced such geniuses as Mozart
and Beethoven.
From Furtwngler to Bernstein
A few days before, Hellenbroich told the audience, the Frankfurter
Allgemeine Zeitung had burst out with a vicious attack against Furtwngler
in honor of the 25th anniversary of the latter's death, calling him a "cult
figure" whom history has blown up to unrealistic proportions. The West
German newspaper specifically attacked "So Denken Wie Beethoven"
("Think Like Beethoven"), written by Hellenbroich and published in Labor
Committee journals on two continents.
Furtwngler himself was a humanist conductor and pianist who understood
the Platonic conceptions behind music, unlike the "trolley-car conductors" of
today, such as Bernstein, Ozawa, and unfortunately many others. Furtwngler was received with great enthusiasm by American audiences, and worked
to build a cultural bridge for the general public. This, Hellenbroich explained, was the reason for the vicious "anti-Nazi" slander campaign run
against Furtwngler, and for operations run by the Eastern Establishment to
prevent him from returning to this country a second time.
Hellenbroich further illustrated the importance of music to education with
the case of Leonard Bernstein, the New York-based conductor and disco
patron who composed the music to West Side Story and conducted
Beethoven's Ninth Symphony in the same stroke. Interviewed recently in
West Germany's Stern magazine, Bernstein emerges as a degraded cultist
who kisses his gold cufflinks for luck before a performance, goes up to the
stage, "falls in love" with his orchestra, and at the end of the performance
feels a "high" which, in his own description, is just as if he had taken a drug.
The Lawfulness of Freedom
The question to deal with in music education, said Hellenbroich, is how to
focus on the principle of thinking in music. How do you lead children to
discover for themselves the lawfulness of leading tones, for example?

For the answer, Hellenbroich turned to the mind of a great composer such as
Beethoven. To create something which forces another person to discover
something new, involves teaching that person in such a way as to evoke and
elevate his soul. This quality, this elevation of the soul, distinguishes human
beings from animals; and it is the wish to bring forward this precious
quality and transform people into thinking human beings which drives such
an individual to compose great music for this purpose.
To lead the audience through Beethoven's thought process, Hellenbroich
asked a few members of the Humanist Academy Orchestra and Choir to
perform several "moments" of Beethoven's Choral Fantasia, Op. 80.
Details were demonstrated whereby Beethoven "teased" the audience,
defied their expectations, and created increasing contrapuntal tension,
forcing them to focus their attention on the process of development in the
music and in their own minds.
One example was Beethoven's selection of instruments in a certain
succession to introduce the variations which comprise the piece, in such a
way that the contrast in their sounds evokes a deep sense of irony. Other
methods included trills and other embellishments injected into the piece in
places that defy Aristotelian "logic." One instance of this occurs in the piano
introduction of the themewhich itself emerges from a set of variations
which, if one follows a "logical" path of causality, are totally unrelated to it.
Peter Wyer played the theme as it would have been conceived by an
Aristotelian, and then the way Beethoven composed itwith trills, pauses,
all suggesting to the listener that something is going on below the surface,
that the real subject matter is not the mere framework of the theme. This
effect is echoed in the beginning of the tenth variationin which the
instruments introduced are human voiceswhere the tenor and bass begin
their line, pause for a piano embellishment, and then continue as if nothing
had happened.
The audience is thus shown relentlessly that the real subject matter, the real
significance of the piece, lies not in the theme itself, but in the process of
completion ("Vollendung") of that theme.
Hellenbroich also showed how the composer was able to lawfully determine
a singularity in the piecemanifested by a shift of tonality taking place on
the word "Kraft" (power)that might give the audience a direct sense, a
discovery, of just what creative power can be!

First Signs of Success

For his final demonstrations, Hellenbroich called to the stage a group of
Labor Committee children who for some time have been learning music
along the lines proposed by Hellenbroich and by Lyndon H. LaRouche, Jr.
These children, who range from six to ten years of age, sang a Christmas
carol in solfege (i.e. using the syllables "do, re, mi" etc. to represent the steps
in the tonal scale), and then performed canons which several of the children
had written for voice or piano.
It was clear to the audience that such a group of children, who understand
musical concepts presently unknown to a great percentage of the population,
is an indication not only of the success of these methods, but of the hope of
mankind.