Whatever one wishes to make of them, these quotation fit into our discussion
of Pound's attitude towards workers; they may help us to understand better
the genesis of the "factory music" idea:

    "If you don't believe that Mussolini is driven by
a vast and deep "concern" or will for the welfare
of Italy, not Italy as a bureaucracy, or Italy as a
state machinery stuck up on top of the people, but
for Italy organic, composed of the last ploughman
and the last girl in the olive-yards, then you will
have a great deal of trouble about he un-Jeffersonian
details of his surfaces."
     JEFF and/ or MUSS, Ch. 6, "Intelligentsias" (publ. 1935)

Pound objects to the stalinist notion of workers as "material". The liberal
version of this dehumanizing concept, he says, is to regard workers as as
only so much "labour". In the broadcasts, he refers several times to the
slave labor camps in Russia, as described by cummings in EIMI.  He says that
loan-capital is the cause of the dehumanization, and that both the
demo-liberal and stalinist regimes are corrupted by it.

In _ANTHEIL and the Treatise on Harmony_ (publ. 1927) he writes:

    "As for the machine shop, the boiler works,
Antheil has opened the way with his _Ballet
Mechanique_; for the first time we have a music,
or the germ and start of a music that can be ap-
plied to sound regardless of its loudness. The
aesthete goes to a factory, if he ever does go, and
hears _noise_, and goes away horrified; the mu-
sician, the composer hears noise, but he tries to
(?) "see" (no, no), he tries to _hear_ what kind
of noise it is."


    " 'Music' as taught in the academies deals with
the organization of smallish bits of sound, of
sounds having certain variations inside the sec-
ond, organized into forms, or bits of form having
differences inside a minute or ten minutes, or,
if the 'great forms,' half an hour.
   But with the grasp of the _longer durations_ we
see the chance of time-spacing the clatter, the
grind, the whang-gang, the gnnrrr, in a ma-
chine shop, so that the eight-hour day shall have
its rhythm; so that the men at the machines shall
be demechanized, and work not like robots, but
like the members of an orchestra. And the work
will benefit, yes, the overlords needs [sic] not worry;
a half-minute's silence here and there, the long
pause of the lunch hour dividing the two great
halves of the music, this will not diminish the
output or pegiorate the quality of the product."

Tim Romano