In Los Angeles, a city where Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” is performed sans clothes, where Shakespeare is performed in leather, and where the cultural events of the season are movie premiers with pasty, anorexic, movie stars teetering in spike heels down a red carpet (made in China), Lyndon LaRouche's campaign has just carried out a cultural coup d'état. One of the world’s leading voice doctors joined us for four days of intense and demanding work to develop the natural beauty in all of us (and we're not talking skin tones).

Maestro Jose Briano, friend of the Schiller Institute, and of Democratic Presidential pre-candidate,“Maestro” Lyndon LaRouche, teaches a full schedule of voice students in Mexico. He joined the LaRouche Youth Movement for four days of voice training in bel canto.

Believe it or not,“beautiful singing” is absent from virtually every music conservatory in the country. But, according to LaRouche, it is the only rational way to sing, and that is why Maestro Briano was invited to share his experience and passion with over 60 organizers and friends in Los Angelos this past week.

	Maestro Briano coaching the female voice.

Maestro Briano's calculated, thorough method is provocative. Every time the answer-hungry Gen-Xers ask him“how to vibrate the voice,” or“how to make a sound,” he forces us to create an image in our minds of what we want to produce, and often, through concentrated work, the sound just emerges. He challenges us to make the sound as“beautiful” as possible, and he would bluntly tell us when the sound created was ugly. The mind, he explains, is very powerful, and orders the body to do what it wants. Therefore one must know beauty first, or have a sense of it, to create it. Instead of the popular current that beauty is a magical, external accident that only few are destined to own, beauty becomes an idea, which subsumes the physical parts and is universal.

Many times Briano is confronted with this axiom of“accidental genetics,” and he uses the metaphor of a“champion not being born, but having to work hard in the gymnasium to develop his natural capability.” At the same time, he trains the voice technically to allow it to keep up with the quality of the idea in the mind. This is an important principle that LaRouche's youth movement is demonstrating: that ideas are accessible to anyone who fights for them, regardless of background.

His patience was refreshing, and it is clear that his life's mission is to create beauty.

		Maestro Briano coaching the male voice