SYNTHESIS

Synthesis is the opposite of analysis.  In the first, you take different things and put them together to make one new thing.  In the second, you take one thing and separate it into the different things that make it up.  A song is a synthesis.  It is one new thing created by combining many different things.  An analysis of the song will reveal any number of things; paper, ink, symbols, words, notes, sounds, and an instrument to name a few.

Is it any wonder that in a world so focussed on analysis, the taking apart of things, music struggles?  Is it any wonder that musicians find themselves somehow out of the loop in everyday function?  After all, the coin of our realm is putting unrelated things together into a new existence.  While colleagues dither over how much money hiring an engineer will cost, we can already see the bridge.  We live in a world of possible combinations-but jobs, recreation and politics spin around an axis of this thing or another.  The everyday world walks around in aisles that say "yes or no," "right or left," "black or white."  Yet, a musician knows that "right and left" together might reveal a totally different way to go.

While colleagues and friends rush around in rational, we have already put together all the little bits and pieces and formed a whole raft of possible shapes for the future.  The problem is that the rational, analytic forces don't see how it all came together.  They cry out that they need to see the "steps."  They refuse just to relax into the process and trust the outcome.  They believe that mastery comes from control of the pieces.

But the singer knows mastery comes from trusting the song.  Beethoven themes are two note themes.  Beethoven chord progressions are I-V chord progressions.  It is not mastery of two notes and two chords that gives us Symphony no. 5.  It is the unique synthesis of those elements that makes the first movement of the Moonlight Sonata take hold.

Scientists in laboratories tell us that breaking reality into its smallest parts will teach us its nature.  Musicians know that reality is the way those parts are together.  I believe the world could use a few more musicians at the wheel,in control, as it were; not so much because we are masters of the ways that things work, but because we are masters at the possibility that things can work, even if we don't know how.