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Maestro Briano Exercises Minds To
Build Beautiful LaRouche
Youth Movement Voices

by Matthew Ogden

Maestro José Briano instructs the East Coast LaRouche Youth Movement in the art and beauty of Bel Canto singing on Dec. 17, in Baltimore.

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Dec. 18 (EIRNS)—“Singing through the ghettoes” is how Lyndon Larouche described the method in which his youth movement would secure a victory for him in the Jan. 13 Washington, D.C. primary election. There's no way to win by just counting votes. The population of Washington sees themselves as slaves and victims. The only way to inspire them to participate in a history changing process is to give them a taste of what it means to be truly human. The Youth Movement has been bringing beauty to the streets of a population, whose culture allows the outlet of everything, as long as it's not beautiful.

Maestro Jose Briano, a world renowned singing teacher from Mexico, is spending a week with the members of the East Coast LaRouche Youth Movement, teaching us his own method for mastering the art of Bel Canto. Bel Canto, which means “beautiful singing” in Italian, is not just a technique for training the vocal apparatus; it's spiritual training as well.

Over the course of the week, new members of the LYM, straight out of the hip-hop culture, got to discover that they, too, had beautiful voices, and this gave them a chance to communicate an emotion which today's culture goes at great lengths to eradicate—a love for humanity.

Every human being is created with the equal potential for producing beauty. As your voice develops, you have a gift which you can then give to the entire world. This is what the youth movement is doing as we march through places like Anacostia. This is how we'll rescue a population made slaves to a culture of ugliness.

It Starts with the Mind

For Maestro Briano, everything starts with the mind, including beauty. As opposed to your common music professor, Maestro Briano seldom speaks of mechanical technicalities. Since the physical action starts with the idea, as LaRouche has proven in his work on economics, Maestro Briano will put out a metaphor, a mental image. To get this image, this idea, is the most important, since it is the mind which controls everything else. He used the example of a person sitting down. He said, if I then wished to get back up, and had to think about every muscle needed to do every action, I'd never get back up.

In terms of technique, he used several examples. He asked people to imagine they were on a mountain peak, and they needed to be heard on another distant mountain peak. Or that they were in a crowded theater, and they had to be heard in the very back of the hall, over top of the orchestra. He even asked people to think of the person they love the most, and to project the sound out to them.

Maestro Briano had people get the image of vibrato (which is what gives a note its life) by having Maestro Sigerson play a note on his double bass, first, with a straight, flat tone, with his finger sitting stationary on the string, and then with a living, vibrated sound, by moving his hand, rapidly lengthening and shortening the string. If we have this idea, the mind is then able to replicate this image. This is better than any mechanical theory.

'Vocal Gymnastics'

The vocal cords are muscle ligaments which close to make a very quiet sound, which is then amplified by resonance chambers throughout the sinus area in the head, and in the chest, just as the sound produced by the bowed string of a cello is amplified by the hollow body. These muscles need to be strengthened. Maestro Briano tirelessly rehearsed with us from morning until late at night, leading us through three straight hours of “vocal gymnastics” at a time. A handful of members of the Youth Movement spent much of the time observing the Maestro's method of teaching, in order to be able to carry on this work after he leaves.

The Youth Movement discovered over the past few days that, whether it's politically, spiritually, emotionally, or artistically, beauty takes a lot of hard work.



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