Recapitulation Quotes

• The point of recapitulation in the first movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony unleashes one of the most horrifyingly violent episodes in the history of music....The point is not to hold up Beethoven as exceptionally monstrous. The Ninth Symphony is probably our most compelling articulation in music of the contradictory impulses that have organized patriarchal culture since the Enlightenment. Moreover, within the parameters of his own musical compositions, he may be heard as enacting a critique of narrative obligations that is...devestating.

  Susan McClary

  Symphony, Musical, Enlightenment

  "Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality". Book by Susan McClary, 1991.

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• Recapitulation provided a convenient focus for the persuasive racism of white scientists; they looked to the activities of their own children for comparison with normal adult behavior in lower races.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Children, White, Race

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• It is now firmly established that ontogeny does not repeat phylogeny

  George Gaylord Simpson

  Doe, Repeats

  George Gaylord Simpson (1957). “Life: an introduction to biology”

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• Both of these branches of evolutionary science, are, in my opinion, in the closest causal connection; this arises from the reciprocal action of the laws of heredity and adaptation.

  Ernst Haeckel

  Law, Connections, Branches

  ernst haeckel “the riddle of the universe”

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• Down to their innate molecular core, cancer cells are hyperactive, survival-endowed, scrappy, fecund, inventive copies of ourselves.

  Siddhartha Mukherjee

  Cancer, Cells, Survival

  Siddhartha Mukherjee (2011). “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer”, p.388, Simon and Schuster

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• The teleology of the Universe is directed to the production of Beauty... The type of Truth required for the final stretch of Beauty is a discovery and not a recapitulation... Apart from Beauty, Truth is neither good, nor bad... Truth matters because of beauty.

  Alfred North Whitehead

  Beauty, Discovery, Matter

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• Extraordinarily excessive sensuality it may be .. but it all comes down to the same thing in the end, and one means is surely as good as another, since the end obtained is always the same. In any case the exceptional, endlessly repeated, is no different than the banal; and unceasing recapitulation can add nothing, in the end, to the sum of experience. I am weary and hopeless three times the dupe. Why have you trained me in the shame of abominable sins?

  Remy de Gourmont

  Mean, Lust, Different

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• Water is an individual, an animal, and is alive, remove the hydrogen and it is an animal and is alive; the remaining oxygen is also an individual, an animal, and is alive. Recapitulation: the two individuals combined, constitute a third individual-and yet each continues to be an individual....here was mute Nature explaining the sublime mystery of the Trinity so luminously that even the commonest understanding could comprehend it, whereas many a trained master of words had labored to do it with speech and failed.

  Mark Twain

  Animal, Oxygen, Two

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• If the records that I make have one thing in common, it's that there is little recapitulation, and the idea is that it should end in a place very different from where it began, and that you've heard musicians undergo a change or be irreversibly transformed.

  David Grubbs

  Ideas, Records, Littles

  Interview with Nick Hallett, logger.believermag.com. May 16, 2013.

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• I established the opposite view, that this history of the embryo (ontogeny) must be completed by a second, equally valuable, and closely connected branch of thought - the history of race (phylogeny). Both of these branches of evolutionary science, are, in my opinion, in the closest causal connection; this arises from the reciprocal action of the laws of heredity and adaptation... 'ontogenesis is a brief and rapid recapitulation of phylogenesis, determined by the physiological functions of heredity (generation) and adaptation (maintenance).

  Ernst Haeckel

  Views, Law, Opposites

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• The point of recapitulation in the first movement of the Ninth [Symphony of Beethoven] is one of the most horrifying moments in music, as the carefully prepared cadence is frustrated, damming up energy which finally explodes in the throttling, murderous rage of a rapist incapable of attaining release.

  Susan McClary

  Symphony, Frustrated, Movement

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• To put it in a few words, the true malice of man appears only in the state and in the church, as institutions of gathering together, of recapitulation, of totalization.

  Paul Ricoeur

  Religious, Men, Church

  Paul Ricoeur (1974). “The Conflict of Interpretations”, p.423, Northwestern University Press

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• Cancer's life is a recapitulation of the body's life, its existence a pathological mirror of our own. Susan Sontag warned against overburdening an illness with metaphors. But this is not a metaphor. Down to their innate molecular core, cancer cells are hyperactive, survival-endowed, scrappy, fecund, inventive copies of ourselves.

  Siddhartha Mukherjee

  Cancer, Mirrors, Cells

  Siddhartha Mukherjee (2011). “The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer”, p.388, Simon and Schuster

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• A rare book at once of great importance and wonderful to read.... Gould presents a fascinating historical study of scientific racism, tracing it through monogeny and polygeny, phrenology , recapitulation, and hereditarian IQ theory. He stops at each point to illustrate both the logical inconsistencies of the theories and the prejudicially motivated, albeit unintentional, misuse of data in each case.... A major addition to the scientific literature.

  Stephen Jay Gould

  Book, Data, Racism

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• From the point of view of the pure morphologist the recapitulation theory is an instrument of research enabling him to reconstruct probable lines of descent; from the standpoint of the student of development and heredity the fact of recapitulation is a difficult problem whose solution would perhaps give the key to a true understanding of the real nature of heredity.

  E.S. Russell

  Nature, Real, Science

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• Shakespeare wrote his sonnets within a strict discipline, fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, rhyming in three quatrains and a couplet. Were his sonnets dull? Mozart wrote his sonatas within an equally rigid discipline - exposition, development, and recapitulation. Were they dull?.

  David Ogilvy

  Discipline, Three, Development

  David Ogilvy (1963). “Confessions of an advertising man”, Holiday House

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