Unification is the process of bringing the elements of life and of self together into harmony.
Real
True Narratives
By all accounts, Abigail and John Adams personified unity of purpose in their marriage of fifty-four years and their public lives.
- Joseph J. Ellis, First Family: Abigail & John Adams (Alfred A. Knopf, 2010).
- Margaret A. Hogan, C. James Taylor and Joseph J. Ellis, eds., My Dearest Friend: Letters of Abigail and John Adams (Belknap Press, 2007).
- Woody Holton, Abigail Adams (Thorndike Press, 2010).
- Edith B. Gelles, Abigail and John: Portrait of a Marriage (William Morrow, 2009).
- David McCullough, John Adams (Simon & Schuster, 2001).
- John Ferling, John Adams: A Life (Oxford University Press, 2010).
- Unification of life through art:
- Wynton Marsalis, Moving to Higher Ground: How Jazz Can Change Your Life (Random House, 2008).
Technical and Analytical Readings
- Daniel Kahneman, Thinking, Fast and Slow (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2011): utilizing conflicts between intuitive and deliberative thinking to develop a two-systems approach to thought.
Imaginary
Music: Composers, artists, and major works
Beethoven composed the seven movements of his String Quartet No. 14 in C sharp minor, Op. 131, to be played together in sequence, without significant pause between the movements. In addition and perhaps more important, “for the first time in Beethoven’s music there is as emphatic and unmistakable thematic connection between the first movement and the last, not a reminiscence, but a functional parallel which helps bind the whole work together.”
Mozart, String Quintets:
- No. 1 in B flat major, K 174 (1773)
- No. 2 in C minor, K 406 (1787)
- No. 3 in C major, K 515 (1787)
- No. 4 in G minor, K 516 (1787)
- No. 5 in D major, K 593 (1790)
- No. 6 in E flat major, K 614 (1791)
Other compositions:
- Dutilleux, Trois Préludes (1973/1988): “. . . distilling innovations from the post-war era and a notable instance of Duilleux’s ability to harness nominally disparate items into a unified conception.” [Richard Whitehouse, Gramophone magazine, November 2021 issue, p. 60.]
Albums:
- Doug Carn, “Adam’s Apple” (1974): soulful spirituality from an African-American perspective at a remarkably unique time in U.S. history
- Firasso, “Tales” (2021): “The group unites a classical clarinetist, an accordion player specialised in ‘new music’ and a jazz double bassist. Together, they fuse a post-genre mix of music which draws on the musical vocabulary of tango, klezmer, Balkan music and French musette.” This is a musical version of e pluribus, unum – from many, one.
- Grosse Isle, “Le bonhomme sept heures / The Bonesetter” (2021): Grosse Isle is an island in the St. Lawrence river in Québec, which served as a refuge for people escaping the Irish potato famine of the 1840s. The album brings together music from Québec and Ireland, as happened when these two cultures intermingled in Canada in the 19th century.
- Roxana Amed, “Unánime” (2022): “‘Beyond the common translation of “unanimous,” to me, Unánime means one soul, one voice, one heart,’ Roxana explains. ‘All the different guests on this album, although coming from different countries, are still united in the love for North American Jazz. And there is also this ‘Latin sound’ blending with that other tradition, no matter from where we come.'”