Tim,

Thanks for these quotations.

==Dan

At 07:26 AM 8/6/00 -0400, you wrote:
>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
>
HOME:
Dan Pearlman
102 Blackstone Blvd. #5
Providence, RI 02906
Tel.: 401 453-3027
email: [log in to unmask]
Fax: (253) 681-8518
http://www.uri.edu/artsci/english/clf/

OFFICE
Department of English
University of Rhode Island
Kingston, RI 02881
Tel.: 401 874-4659