Wisdom is a complex human trait, characterized by a marriage of the intellect with the emotions, and put into action. By three methods we may learn wisdom: First, by reflection, which is noblest; Second, by imitation, which is easiest; and third by experience, which is the bitterest. [attributed to Confucius] The saddest aspect of life right now is that science…
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Value for Friday of Week 15 in the season of Sowing
Analyzing and Synthesizing
To analyze is to take apart, to separate cognitively into component parts. To synthesize is to put the parts together, and see the whole.
- Analyze your life in terms of its environment. Are the things around you helping you toward success – or are they holding you back? [W. Clement Stone]
- Intellectuals are in a position to expose the lies of governments, to analyze actions according to their causes and motives and often hidden intentions. [Noam Chomsky]
- A speciality in comprehensive design is an emerging synthesis of artist, inventor, mechanic, objective economist and evolutionary strategist. [R. Buckminster Fuller]
To understand how something works, we must be able to take it apart and then put it back together. Often this is the only way to see the details and understand the mechanics of operation. Intellectually, this is the process of analysis and synthesis, the best analog to evolution in a static state: evolution examines the details of operation over time, whereas analysis and synthesis examines the details of operation of a fixed entity.
This technique should be a part of standard primary and secondary education, and should be continued throughout every stage of learning and practice. It is as essential to an understanding of the forces that affect our lives as evolution is to biology. Its recognition and assimilation as an established and necessary part of education will mark a major step forward in the intellectual development of cultures. If civilizations are to survive and the people, broadly speaking, are to prosper, given the complexity of our technologies, the question is not whether this will occur but when.
Real
True Narratives
Ernst Mayr was an extraordinary scholar and author on evolutionary theory. Over a long career (he worked until his death at age 100), he analyzed his chosen field of biology, and then was instrumental in bringing about the modern evolutionary synthesis of Mendelian genetics, systematics, and Darwinian evolution. He will long remain among the greatest figures in the biological sciences.
- Ernst Mayr, What Makes Biology Unique?: Considerations on the Autonomy of a Scientific Discipline (Cambridge University Press, 2004).
- Ernst Mayr, The Growth of Biological Thought: Diversity, Evolution, and Inheritance (Belknap Press, 1992).
- Ernst Mayr, This Is Biology: The Science of the Living World (Belknap Press, 1997).
- Ernst Mayr, Toward a New Philosophy of Biology: Observations of an Evolutionist (Harvard University Press, 1988).
Other notable analysts from various fields:
- John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life (The Penguin Press, 2011): "The debate in America between idealism and realism . . . played itself out inside (the) soul" of this "brilliant analyst of long-term trends" in foreign policy.
- Stephen Sondheim, Finishing the Hat: Collected Lyrics (1954-1981) with Attendant Comments, Principles, Heresies, Grudges, Whines and Anecdotes (Alfred A. Knopf, 2010). “’Finishing the Hat’ is essentially about . . . the process of writing songs for theatre.”
- Stephen Sondheim, Look, I Made a Hat: Collected Lyrics (1981-2001) With Attendant Comments, Amplifications, Dogmas, Harangues, Digressions, Anectdotes and Miscellany (Alfred A. Knopf, 2011). Stephen Sondheim analyzes his art.
- Samanth Subramanian, A Dominant Character: The Radical Science and Restless Politics of J.B.S. Haldane (Norton, 2020): “Thanks in good part to the insights of Haldane and a few other gifted, mathematically-minded researchers, evolutionary biology became a powerful science that embraces a vast range of temporal and physical scales, from the passage of geological ages to the collision of a single sperm and egg, from the biosphere to the gene.”
- Francesco Fiorani, The Shadow Drawing: How Science Taught Leonardo How to Paint (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2020): “Leonardo’s interests were not as dizzyingly disparate as they seem. His mind sought synthesis. He was hunting basic principles, the fundamental laws of all nature.”
History as analysis and synthesis:
- Richard Overy, Blood and Ruins: The Last Imperial War, 1931-1945 (Viking, 2022): “It will help you to grasp and revisit the carnage of 1931-45 as the largest event in human history. No continent, no ocean was spared, and Overy deftly weaves all the subplots into one planetary tapestry of merciless ideology and industrialized extermination.”
Books about analyzing and/or synthesizing:
- Margo Jefferson, Constructing a Nervous System: A Memoir (Pantheon Books, 2022): “If Margo Jefferson had gone into another profession — cabinetmaking, let’s say — she’d be the type to draw and redraw plans for a cabinet, build and tinker with the cabinet, stand back to look at the cabinet from every angle, probe the purpose of woodworking, take a break to go examine 2,000 other cabinets, then disassemble her own product and start from scratch with alternative tools, creating an object that no longer resembled a cabinet but performed all the functions of one in startling ways.”
Technical and Analytical Readings
Analysis:
- Ethan Bueno de Mesquita & Anthony Fowler, Thinking Clearly with Data: A Guide to Quantitative Reasoning and Analysis (Princeton University Press, 2021).
- Lara Alcock, How to Think About Analysis (Oxford University Press, 2014).
- James O. Prochaska & John C. Norcross, Systems of Psychotherapy: A Transtheoretical Analysis (Oxford University Press, 9th edition, 2014).
- Elena Llaudet & Kosuke Imai, Data Analysis for Social Science: A Friendly and Practical Introduction (Princeton University Press, 2023).
- Devinderjit Sivia & John Skilling, Data Analysis: A Bayesian Tutorial (Oxford University Press, 2nd edition, 2006).
- Books from the Princeton Lectures in Analysis are found on Google Books at this link, and on Amazon at this link.
Synthesis:
- William A. Wallace, The Modeling of Nature: The Philosophy of Science and the Philosophy of Nature in Synthesis (Catholic University of America Press, 1996).
- Julian Huxley, Evolution: The Modern Synthesis (1943).
- Massimo Pigliucci & Gerd B. Muller, eds., Evolution, the Extended Synthesis (MIT Press, 2010).
- Edward O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (1975).
- Andrea Pejrolo & Scott B. Metcalfe, Creating Sounds from Scratch: A Practical Guide to Music Synthesis for Producers and Composers (Oxford University Press, 2017).
- Sam McGuire & Nathan Van der Rest, The Musical Art of Synthesis (Focal Press, 2016).
- John Hattie, Visible Learning: The Sequel: A Synthesis of Over 2,100 Meta-Analyses Relating to Achievement (Routledge, 2023).
Photographs
Documentary and Educational Films
Imaginary
Fictional Narratives
In Les Misérables, Hugo expressed his views not only through narrative but also through formal analysis:
1831 and 1832, the two years which are immediately connected with the Revolution of July, form one of the most peculiar and striking moments of history. These two years rise like two mountains midway between those which precede and those which follow them. They have a revolutionary grandeur. Precipices are to be distinguished there. The social masses, the very assizes of civilization, the solid group of superposed and adhering interests, the century-old profiles of the ancient French formation, appear and disappear in them every instant, athwart the storm clouds of systems, of passions, and of theories. These appearances and disappearances have been designated as movement and resistance. At intervals, truth, that daylight of the human soul, can be descried shining there. This remarkable epoch is decidedly circumscribed and is beginning to be sufficiently distant from us to allow of our grasping the principal lines even at the present day. We shall make the attempt. The Restoration had been one of those intermediate phases, hard to define, in which there is fatigue, buzzing, murmurs, sleep, tumult, and which are nothing else than the arrival of a great nation at a halting-place. These epochs are peculiar and mislead the politicians who desire to convert them to profit. In the beginning, the nation asks nothing but repose; it thirsts for but one thing, peace; it has but one ambition, to be small. Which is the translation of remaining tranquil. Of great events, great hazards, great adventures, great men, thank God, we have seen enough, we have them heaped higher than our heads. We would exchange Cæsar for Prusias, and Napoleon for the King of Yvetot. "What a good little king was he!" We have marched since daybreak, we have reached the evening of a long and toilsome day; we have made our first change with Mirabeau, the second with Robespierre, the third with Bonaparte; we are worn out. Each one demands a bed. [Victor Hugo, Les Miserables (1862), Volume IV – Saint-Denis; Book First – A Few Pages of History, Chapter I, “Well Cut”.]
Revolt is a sort of waterspout in the social atmosphere which forms suddenly in certain conditions of temperature, and which, as it eddies about, mounts, descends, thunders, tears, razes, crushes, demolishes, uproots, bearing with it great natures and small, the strong man and the feeble mind, the tree trunk and the stalk of straw. Woe to him whom it bears away as well as to him whom it strikes! It breaks the one against the other. It communicates to those whom it seizes an indescribable and extraordinary power. It fills the first-comer with the force of events; it converts everything into projectiles. It makes a cannon-ball of a rough stone, and a general of a porter. [Victor Hugo, Les Miserables (1862), Volume IV – Saint-Denis; Book Tenth – The 5th of June, 1832, Chapter I, “The Surface of the Question”.]
Janice Hallett “likes to whittle down her stories to their constituent parts so that we can sort through the evidence ourselves, like chefs puzzling through a box of discordant ingredients that are meant to become a meal.” Her novels include:
- The Examiner: A Novel (Simon & Schuster, 2024): “Six students begin a one-year master’s degree program in multimedia art at a British university that has recently been forced to cut many of its fine art programs and redesign the degree with an eye toward art’s business relevancy. They come together as strangers, representing an eclectic mix of ages and backgrounds. . . . Played for comedy, the whole thing would have seemed superficial, but as a commentary on art’s current role in academia and business, as well as the darker side of human ambition and gullibility, Hallett’s unconventional novel proves both creative and astute.”
- The Mysterious Case of the Alperton Angels: A Novel (Simon & Schuster, 2023): “. . . it’s told mostly through the emails, texts, and WhatsApp messages of Amanda Bailey, its main character. Amanda is an ambitious journalist and true-crime aficionado who garners a book deal to tell the story of the Alperton Angels, a cult whose members allegedly committed suicide in London in 2003.”
- The Twyford Code: A Novel (Simon & Schuster, 2022): “Forty years ago, Steven ‘Smithy’ Smith found a copy of a famous children’s book by disgraced author Edith Twyford, its margins full of strange markings and annotations. When he showed it to his remedial English teacher Miss Iles, she believed that it was part of a secret code that ran through all of Twyford’s novels. And when she disappeared on a class field trip, Smithy became convinced that she had been right.”
- The Appeal: A Novel (Simon & Schuster, 2022): “The Fairway Players are a close-knit drama group in a small town outside London, socially centered around the club's founders, the Haywards and their children. Plans for their upcoming production of Arthur Miller's All My Sons are upended when Martin Hayward, the patriarch of the family and leader of the drama group, announces that his 2-year-old granddaughter, Poppy, has been diagnosed with a rare form of cancer.”
Novels:
- George Saunders, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life (Random House, 2021): analyzing seven classic Russian short stories.
- Frederic Tuten, The Bar at Twilight: Stories (Bellevue Literary Press, 2022): “. . . full of bittersweet portraits of artists and the places that shaped them.”
- Curtis Sittenfeld, Romantic Comedy: A Novel (Random House, 2023): “So much of Sittenfeld’s work exists in the dissection and comprehension of female desire: what we want, what we absolutely don’t and, maybe paramount, what we’re even allowed to have.”
Poetry
Books about poetry:
- Brad Leithauser, Rhyme’s Rooms: The Architecture of Poetry (Knopf, 2022), “is loosely arranged as a guide to poetry’s structures and devices — stanzas, slant rhyme and so forth . . . But Leithauser’s approach is essayistic rather than procedural; this book is not a how-to so much as a how-about.”
Music: Composers, artists, and major works
Ludwig van Beethoven knew he was approaching the end of his life when he composed his final opus, the String Quartet No. 16 in F major, Op. 135 (1826) (approx. 24-27’) (list of recorded performances). To the untrained ear, or to those who are unaware of Beethoven’s history, this quartet may sound conventional. But others have noted that it is a distillation. This work brings to mind a T.S. Eliot poem, “Little Gidding”: “And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.” However, the value of synthesis is not merely to die in peace or remembrance. The greater message in Beethoven’s music is that we can reflect on all the places we’ve been – physically, emotionally, intellectually – take stock, and move forward, renewed and enriched.
Other compositions:
- Inspired by the great transcendentalists who thrived in Concord, Massachusetts in the mid-19th century, Charles Ives constructed his Piano Sonata No. 2, “Concord, Mass., 1840-1860” (1915) (approx. 43-48’) (list of recorded performances), in the reverse order of complexity from the usual. Each movement is at its most dense at complex in the beginning, then trims down to one or two ideas. Thus, the work is a musical analog to the process of simplification by analysis. “Ives explained that, taken together, the music and the essays were ‘an attempt to present (one person’s) impression of the spirit of transcendentalism that is associated in the minds of many with Concord, Mass., of over half a century ago. . .’” “. . . the sonata is a series of meditations on four great Transcendentalist writers: Emerson, Hawthorne, 'The Alcotts,' and Thoreau.”
- In Reich/Richter for large ensemble (2019) (approx. 37’), composer Steve Reich worked off a painting by Gerhard Richter, with whom he collaborated on the project, to create a musical composition that reduced sound to simple components, then expanded it again. This mirrored a process that Richter had used with his work of visual art. Reich explains the process, referencing Richter’s painting: “It starts with one of his abstract paintings from the ’90s. He scanned a photo of the painting into a computer and then cut the scan in half and took each half, cut that in half and two of the four quarters he reversed into mirror images. He then repeated this process of ‘divide, mirror, repeat’ from half to quarter, eighth, sixteenth, thirty-second, all the way up to 4096th. The net effect is to go from an abstract painting to a series of gradually smaller anthropomorphic ‘creatures’ (since the mirroring produces bilateral symmetry) to still smaller ‘psychedelic’ abstractions to very fine stripes.”
- Jóhann Jóhannsson, Drone Mass (2015) (approx. 51’): “. . . the work represents what the Icelandic composer called ‘a distillation of a lot of influences and obsessions’. As the title suggests, those obsessions include his fascination with the musical device of the drone. This was something Jóhannsson felt as a visceral presence, ‘a fundamental vibration that anchors music and gives you a foundation’. He often used both acoustic and electronic drones – sometimes gently underpinning the music, sometimes drowning out everything else.”
- Benjamin Frankel, Symphony No. 1, Op. 33 (1958) (approx. 24-26’): In the first movement, per the composer, “the tonal debate, between tonic and dominant, is raised to the higher and more complex area of multitonality, and where the constant renewing of thematic elements replaces the notions of 1st subject, 2nd subject, development, etc.”; the second movement presents contrasting textures and a kaleidoscope of scenes [Buxton Orr]; the concluding movement offers a plain melody, which is turned on its head but persists until the work concludes.
- John Foulds, Dynamic Triptych for Piano and Orchestra, Op. 88 (1929) (approx. 29’) (list of recorded performances): the three movements are titled “Dynamic Mode”, “Dynamic Timbre” and “Dynamic Rhythm”, suggesting the analysis of music through component parts. “Fundamentally this is a piano concerto by another name. I suppose ‘Dynamic’ simply means that it moves and ‘Triptych’ means that it is in three parts.”
- Heitor Villa-Lobos, Symphony No. 12 (1957) (approx. 24-26’) (list of recorded performances) is a “synthesis between European style and Latin soul”.
- Arto Koskinen, Fuga Indiana (1987-2000) (approx. 58’): “It is, in the composer’s words, ‘a new synthesis of Eastern and Western music.’”
- Alexander Scriabin, Piano Concerto in F-sharp minor, Op. 20 (1896) (approx. 27-29’) (recordings) displays the dual process of analysis in several ways. He synthesizes the piano and orchestra into a single, breathing unit; it fragments the themes, investigating the structural limits of a theme before it dissolves into atmosphere; and it foreshadows later periods in Scriabin’s composing career, building on his early Chopin-inspired era to the complexity of his later years. “His only true concerto and one of his earliest works to involve a full orchestra, it combines spectacular virtuosity with an abundance of melodic ideas, rich orchestral colors and harmonic diversity.” “. . . it is a document of refinement, of introspection, of finely-spun keyboard tracery, an enshrinement of fundamentally inward feeling, of impulses personal and intimate.”
Divanhana “is a Bosnian sevdah band that performs traditional music in new arrangements, influenced by jazz, pop, and 20th century classical music. Divanhana’s mission is to cherish and represent urban traditional music not only from Bosnia and Herzegovina, but from the whole Balkan region with a particular attention to the Sevdalinka genre.” For more than a decade, it has been releasing outstanding work, which has remained remarkably consistent despite personnel changes. “'Zavrzlama represents our lives in Bosnia and Herzegovina which are so tangled and influenced by different traditions, religion and culture. It represents our rivers, their tributaries, and streams which thigh our mountains that reach so high from where we can see the whole planet. Zavrzlama is also our sevdah tangled with instruments brought from east and west, rhythm structure from different ends of the world, lyrics with a pinch of love, a pinch of joke and a pinch of tragedy. In the end Zavrzlama is the music of this album.' said the members of the band about their new album” in 2021. We could analyze the components, or just absorb and be uplifted by the music.
Albums:
- Christian McBride & Inside Straight, “People Music” (2013) (56’): on this album of swing music, McBride’s aptly-named quintet brings soaring solos together in brilliant synthesis.
- Ran Dank, “Vers le silence” (2021) (73’): “By interpreting William Bolcom’s Twelve New Études with works of Chopin, Dank casts provocative light on these composer-pianists, resulting in intriguing juxtapositions.”
- Ches Smith, “Interpret It Well” (2022) (70’): “Throughout the album, subtle sketches are explored and exploded, minimal ideas often turning into cathartic group journeys.”
- Nduduzo Makhathini, “In the Spirit of Ntu” (2022) (68’): on this album, Makhathini brings together his previous work.
- Billy Mohler, “Anatomy” (2022) (43’): what it is all about.
- WORKS (Michel Gentile, Daniel Kelly & Rob Garcia), “Searching for the Elements” (2024) (66’).
Music: songs and other short pieces
Analyzing:
- The Beatles, “Eleanor Rigby” (lyrics)
- Pink Floyd, “Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2” (lyrics)
Synthesizing:
- Talking Heads, “Once in a Lifetime” (lyrics)
- Daft Punk, “Digital Love” (lyrics) (in blending digital sounds and human emotions)
Visual Arts
Syntheses:
- Gail Rothschild, Difficult Synthesis of Indigo (1961)
- M.C. Escher, Synthesis (1947)
- Wassily Kandinsky, Composition X (The Great Synthesis) (1939)
