Q: Hey, Lyn. This is Ken from Seattle. I was wondering, how do you prepare your mind for hypothesis, during a counterpoint piece, like the {Jesu, meine Freude}? Because, you're saying that the idea is in the counterpoint, but then you have to create the counterpoint first, to know what that idea is.
LAROUCHE: Well, first of all, you should learn the rules of counterpoint. And the rules of Bach's counterpoint, are fairly straightforward. That you have a chest of voices. You have two distinct kinds of elements in these chest of voices: One, within the same person. A soprano has a different chest of voices of than does an alto, or a tenor, or a baritone, or a bass. They lie in a different part of the total musical scale. So that, in any work of more than one human voice, you have not only the three or four, and more, qualities of register shift defined voices; but you also have in the choral work, you have all the different voices included.
Now, the obvious thing in a choral work, is to, in a sequence, when you take the single voice sequence, is you have one voice takes the sequence, makes a statement. Now you can make an affirmative statement, you can copy what was said by one voice into another voice; the soprano says something and the bass answers, or the tenor answers, or the baritone, or the alto. Now, if they answer, they're going to answer the same thing, in a different part of the key, and the register shift is located differently. So, if they're going to do this thing, in terms of saying the same thing, they have to take into account the human voice register shift. Now, you also can have a counter-statement. You can have another statement which is an inversion or something, of the same statement. When you put these things together, or try to put them together, you're trying to put together something which--. Well, first of all, just experiment.
And what you do, to understand counterpoint, you take the Bach {Well-Tempered Klavier}, and you work through the full cycle of both books. Now, when you've done that, by doing that, you now have a sense, or should have a sense through some questions you ask, of why does Bach do what he does? And you get these conceptions, very strict conceptions of what the rules are. Now, if you want to make a composition that works, it means that there has to be a principle of development, through the composition. Now, by having two voices echo one another, in affirming the opening statement of a fugue, you now have created an irony. The irony is, you have a different voice, and therefore you are going through, the indicated key of the composition is going to change. As you go through more voices, and you do one on the other, it changes. You do counter-statements, which agree with that, you get more changes. So therefore, the idea is to get a composition from beginning to end, which has coherence, it has an undercurrent, so you can take the beginning--a pause at the beginning and a pause at the end, and you can think of that composition {as single, seamless work}. But which has development in it: That you come out of this thing knowing much more than you knew going in. You could take all the elements of the thing, you look at them, it means one thing. You take it, in performance as a whole work, it means something completely different than you would get from the elements considered individually as a group.
So now, it's by developing skill in that direction, that people directing a chorus, can induce the chorus to make a meaningful statement, of a polyphonic work; whereas the chorus probably couldn't do it by itself. If the director of the chorus survives that. Now, once you've been trained in doing that, and become more and more conscious of what you're doing, now you begin to understand how it works. It's not a matter of algebra, it's not a matter of configuration. There's a lot to it, but you begin to understand how it works. There're all kinds of complications that come up. And you begin to understand how it works. So, you don't try to figure out creativity in that way. The creativity is in finding the way in which you take this apparatus, which is defined by Bach as illustrated by him, with his {Preludes & Fugues}. You take that as a reference point.
Now, you have to ask yourself: How does Bach's mind work? What does he achieve? What do I get from people who perform these things? And other people who perform them? What's the difference, between some guy who makes a mess of it but plays all the notes, and so forth, right speed, right tempo and so forth, but it's not convincing. It fails. It's a fragment. As opposed to a composition which gets a {unity of effect}, a single idea? And the creativity is located in the controlling role of a consciousness or intention of unity of effect. And that's what you get. You don't go into and say, "How do I play with this, and become creative? What's this factor of creativity?" No. Creativity comes from your mind. It comes from being deeply involved in the experience, of counterpoint. And counterpoint is ordered, so it's accessible as ordering. Matter of fact, if you want to get competent musicians, you always train them in Bach, you always concentrate on the {Preludes & Fugues}, always concentrate there. Because, first of all, you've got to understand what the well-tempered system is. And how creativity works within it. You have to learn to recognize, you say, "My God! He's so creative! Look what he did! I would never have thought of that." Now, you begin to get the idea of creativity in music.
Now, once you get that, and you begin to experiment in your own mind, how would I...? Would this be right? Would that be right? And so forth. And you get it. Now you go out, and you go off with Bach and you take some of his other works which reflect this. And then, you will take some Mozart; you take some Haydn, particularly. Haydn and Mozart, after 1782, compositions written after 1782, particularly, where Haydn and Mozart and others were going weekly, every Sunday, were going to the house of van Swieten, who had been an ambassador of the Habsburg court, who had spent a great deal of time as ambassador in the court of Friedrich der Grosse in Berlin. And there, he became deeply involved with the work of, in particular, Bach and the Bach family. And also Handel, which he liked very much. So when he went back to Vienna, in his quasi-retirement, he opened up his house to create a salon, which met every Sunday, and prominent musicians who were young, and others, who were selected by him, would come to his house on Sunday, and they would go through the manuscripts of Handel and Bach in particular. And they would work through these things. And Haydn underwent a change. Haydn had been schooled earlier in Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, that son of Bach, and the method of Carl Philipp Emanuel, who would say that he didn't dare explicitly defend the methods of his father, Johann Sebastian Bach, because the enemies of Johann Sebastian Bach had tried to crush everything about Bach out of existence, the Romantic school of that time. So, Haydn had been initially trained in the school at St. Stephens were he was a student, in the work of Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach.
But then, when he--and he brought Mozart in--went into this, from 1782 on, went to the van Swieten salons on Sunday, a revolution occurred. And you see the revolution in the change from the {Sun Quartets} which Haydn had done at the beginning of the 1770s. And then you take the quartets he produced later, at the beginning of 1780s, to which Mozart responded with his six quartets, and you see a fundamental change in the method of composition. And you see a change in the way that Haydn composes after that point, and you see the way it changes, immediately, in Mozart's method of composition, especially in the quartets and things like the K.475 and so forth. And you see that. Then you see, in Beethoven: Beethoven went to the same program. Mozart was dead, but Beethoven was brought into this early on, in the 1790s, when he finally moved from Bonn to Vienna. Same thing. And you get a sense--you get some of this in Schubert, but you get a sense that if you take all Classical music combined, and you take from Bach through Beethoven, and of course a couple years later, Schubert dies, after Beethoven, you see there's a period in music in which, this is unique: {There is nothing quite like it.} There's nothing quite like it, in terms of perfection, of impact as a composition, that you get in this period.
This also corresponds, of course, to what's called the Classical period in 18th century. This is the period of the German Classic, the revival of Shakespeare, the revival of Goethe from who-knows-what? The leading role of Schiller, and so forth. Then it's broken up by the effect of 1815, the Napoleonic Wars, which is a period of relative dark age under Napoleon, the Vienna Congress of 1815, then the laws against freedom, the Carlsbad Decrees, later in that time. And you find, as Heine describes it, the whole period from about 1815 on, through the death of Heine--he described, even in 1820s and so forth, described the generation he had entered, the adult generation, the Romantic generation, the generation of the Romantic school, as being corrupt. Such that, even people in the Classical tradition, like himself, were not capable of the levels of accomplishment, which you had had with the work of Haydn, through Beethoven and so forth, and also Schubert. The later generation, which came to maturity during the 1815, that period, were never quite as good, among musicians as well as those who came before, the earlier ones who came before: They didn't have that sense of completeness, that sense of perfection, which is there in Mozart and Beethoven especially. So, that's the problem.
And in getting creativity in music, music is a medium. It's a very important medium. It's the most important of the arts. Of all art, Classical music is the most important. It's the most human. And it's the most closely related to science, in a general way, because it involves people singing, as in choral work; it involves them {in} music. It involves them in it as a culture. And when they put this culture of hearing together with the culture of vision, which is a so-called physical science, then you get true science. And that's the way you approach it: It's a process of self-development, which starts in childhood, of recognizing there's a quality in a human being which no animal has. The quality we call creativity. It lies, not in society, that is, it's not something {among} people; it's not in the interaction of people as such. It's within the person. There's no instrument, there's no faculty, which corresponds to creativity {between} people. There's a faculty of creativity {in} people, and people relate to others in creative matters by {resonance}, in a sense, the creativity of one person {resonates} in the creative potential of another. And it's the social experience of going through the social experience, of understanding music, understanding good music, great music, understanding why you need to have a certain kind of voice-training to sing it properly, effectively: This leads to a recognition, "Ah! {Here} is--! Now, I know what creativity is." And you know it negatively, because you know that you're constantly surprised: You find things in Mozart, that now you begin to understand them. {They surprise you!} You look back at Bach, and you find things that {surprise you!} You see in Beethoven, things that {astonish you, absolutely!} And that's how you learn creativity.