Cantus Firmus = Underlying Structure, Fixed Hymn, Sure Song

Ernst Bloch:
The common endeavors of research workers and teachers require real community.

The university, the universitas literarum, the institutional totality of the various sciences, is no more than a proficient, particularly resplendent expression of community-hence the origin of the original guild designation universitas. In the process a not insignificant role fell to philosophy, which has long felt itself to be the conscience of the university. It is the science in which the consciousness of the totality lives and has to live.

Stemming from times when the progressive division of labor produced by capitalism, and then the increasing and almost anarchistic specialization of vocations, was still unknown, philosophy was concerned above all with the unity of knowledge.

The common melody, the substantive coloration of all learning, is its particular concern and the essential aspect of its method and subject.

When philosophy is doing its job, it offers that moving cantus firmus which provides stability and direction, in which and about which the polyphony of knowledge moves. Totum relucet in omnibus, omnia ubique (the whole lights up again in all things; everything is everywhere), said Nicholas of Cusa in relation to Arabic philosophy; and both Leibniz and Hegel have made this same principle unforgettable.

D. Bonhoeffer: 

"Alright we got some problems" The Gatekeeper in Kafka's The Trial

 "How we gonna solve 'em?" Battle Between Carnival and Lent, Molenaer, 1633  (bellum omnium contra omnes, the war of all against all)

"Well, let's keep it simple"

"But, our life is complex" Kandinsky, Kleine Welten (Small Worlds), 1922

Deleuze & Guatarri:
The role of the refrain has often been emphasized: it is territorial, a territorial assemblage. Bird songs: the bird sings to mark its territory. The Greek modes and Hindu rhythms are themselves territorial, provincial, regional. The refrain may assume other functions, amorous, professional or social, liturgical or cosmic: it always carries earth with it; it has a land (sometimes a spiritual land) as its concomitant; it has an essential relation to a Natal, a Native. A musical "nome" is a little tune, a melodic formula that seeks recognition and remains the bedrock or ground of polyphony (cantus firmus).  

"But just as long as we connect." Ted Nelson, Literary Machines

"So we can move towards the next?" Workers Councils and the Economics of a Self-Managed Society, Cornelius Castoriadis, 1972

"But the future is us"
"Trust me, it's us, in a circle" After the fall of the Western Roman Empire, the amphitheater on its own became a fortified settlement with four towers added during the medieval period. The structure encircled more than 200 houses, becoming a real town, with its public square built in the centre of the arena and two chapels, one in the centre of the building, and another one at the base of the west tower. (new within the shell of the old)

EA Gutkind: 
The structure of society and of the town itself, and contemporary musical expression, develop in complexity side by side. In each case this development is focussed on a centre—the centre of the town and the cantus firmus respectively. The parallel movement of the melody gives place more and more to polyphonic composition. At first it is only as a variation of the organism that the new accompanying voice develops then it takes on its own melody, its own rhythm, and finally its own text.

Bloch on music: 
Social tendencies themselves have been reflected and have been uttered in sound material, far beyond the unchanging facts of nature and far beyond the merely romantic expressivo. No art is as socially conditioned as the supposedly spontaneous, indeed mechanically self-righteous art of music; it teems with historical materialism, precisely with the historical kind.