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