The ‘Florestan Principle’ in Art, And In Manhattan—Why Does Music Offer Humanity a Pathway Towards Peace?
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Tomorrow, the Schiller Institute NYC Chorus will present to a New York City audience the concert, “Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony: A Pathway Out of War.” Along with commemorating the 25th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks on New York City, Washington D.C., and Pennsylvania, where many FDNY, NYPD, and other valiant citizens sacrificed their lives to save their fellow countrymen, the concert is intended to inspire a higher quality of statecraft among nations. That would be premised on the idea that a global dialogue of civilizations can lead the world to the dawn of a new, peaceful thermonuclear age, marked by an international collaboration on “fusion power for peace,” a goal now more certain than at any other time in human history.
The U.S., NATO, and Europe, in the post-9/11 wars which it initiated in Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Ukraine, and now Iran, have earned a well-deserved place of infamy among nations of the Global South, many of whom seek a new just world economic order. This was demonstrated in last week’s meetings of the Shanghai Cooperation Organization in Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan, and the Eastern Economic Forum in Moscow, Russia. The momentum for a post-unipolar world order, now disintegrating before everyone’s eyes, will be accelerated tomorrow, as the BRICS summit begins in New Delhi, India.
In a tumultuous world, where nations are engaged in military wars and financial warfare against one another, why would a presentation of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony provide a viable pathway out for the world? What does classically-performed music offer to humanity? The economist and statesman Lyndon LaRouche, whose life work was dedicated to providing a new just world economic order for all nations, through detailed policy proposals based on his method of the science of physical economy, had given insight into the power of Beethoven’s music—and classical music in general—as it relates to discovering and mastering the creative process in an article, “The ‘Florestan Principle’ in Art,” published in January 7, 1977.
LaRouche says, “[G]reat art has a demonstrated function for alleviating neurotic disturbances and stimulating the creative potentialities. Not accidentally: it is by stimulating the individual's creative potentialities that neurotic impulses are most efficiently checked. A population which lacks enjoyment of great art, great music most emphatically, is not only culturally impaired in the ordinary sense of that term, but is deprived of a means for improvements in its qualities of moral judgment and creativity in general…
“Music emerges and constantly reemerges from the prosodic qualities of the spoken language and is a medium for concentrated evocation of the affective correlatives of that language. The relationship of language to the individual's consciousness-in-general, the individual's conscious and preconscious notions of social identity, makes music the most social of the art forms. Within music generally, song and opera have the advantage of immediately subsuming drama and poetry. Song is the "Rosetta Stone" connecting speech to music in general. The current state of musical comprehension and taste constantly measures afresh the capacities of a people respecting drama and poetry. A culture which loses the impetus for fostering and enjoying great music cannot produce great drama or great poetry.” Or great statecraft, let it be said.
Today’s Fireside Chat, presented by host Dennis Speed, will take up that issue of what LaRouche presents as the ‘Florestan Principle’ in music, in the lead up to tomorrow’s Schiller Institute NYC concert.