One Hand
Clapping:
The Taoe of Music
WholeArts and
The Psychic Internet is proud to present the
"Preface" and "Part One" of this
remarkable book by Daniel d'Quincy. "One Hand
Clapping: The Tao of Music," originally published by
WholeArts in 1991, is a book-length essay on the
performance of music from the perspective of Eastern
philosophy and religion. Mr. d'Quincy is a noted
composer, musician, author, inventor, educator, speaker,
and photographer. Please visit his unique music sites at WholeArts: syNThony, and the WholeArts Online Music Conservatory.
Page 11
This explanation
may be both more and less than we want. We might rather
hearken to that tired old joke about a tourist in New
York, who asks a man on the street, “How do I get to
Carnegie Hall?” The answer comes swiftly, with a
paradiddled rim-shot on the snare, “PRACTICE!”
And with a smattering of practical guidance thrown in for
good measure, music teachers commonly give just exactly
that answer - not only to this question, but also to all
of the others asked above. Practice!
That answer is a
good one, up to a point, and obviously little more is
required if we are merely interested in the
“how” of things – tips on posture perhaps,
a few words hopefully about the conventions of notation
and performance. Indeed, when it comes to deeper
questions, involving psychological and spiritual issues,
there is a risk, as in the quotation from the Chuang Tzu,
of saying too much, a danger of gilding the lily. It is a
living reality that we seek - neither a collection of
exercise routines, nor mysterious enigmas.
We need something
more tangible, answers that we can propose and speak
about with everyday clarity. But do we dare name even the
object of our inquiry. According to the poet, “A
word is dead when it is said.” Words seem to kill
everything they touch.[1] Is there
not within us something beyond words - an irreducible
core of impenetrable obscurity - something that may
actually protect the spirit from defilement or
destruction, something that should not be disturbed with
verbal probes and meters?
This thing is
elusive, and the few people who find it must have
unlimited determination and perseverance. It may be a
little like the core substance of matter itself, which we
never seem to be able to find and hold on to.[2] Each elementary particle along our path of
discovery gives way under higher powers of magnification
to a pattern of even more elementary particles. As we
probe inside of things, we find only the outsides of
still smaller things. We zoom in closer and closer to
reality in our particle accelerators, penetrating matter
at increasingly high levels of energy. The earliest
particle accelerators, which were designed to split the
atom so that we could look inside of it, were mere
hatpins compared to the marvels of electronic design that
are on the drawing boards today. And this analogy at
least has the benefit of highlighting the perilous nature
of an inquiry of this sort, for, according to
Einstein’s all too well know equation, there is a
measurable, if rarely acknowledged, danger that is
associated with such research.[3]
Or, along the
same lines (morally) but expressed more imaginatively,
this thing may be like that minutely small, but
indestructible, kernel of waywardness in the human soul,
which is the basic theme developed in countless
variations through every book of the Bible. There the
perspective is religious. Describing man’s constant
straying from God’s commandments, it is focused
fundamentally on the reconciliation (i.e., integration)
of existential and moral human freedom with a divine and
absolute ideal of right living. Let’s say that it
aims, like the enlightenment referred to above, toward an
art of life. Is there then also the possibility that
right living (not in any narrowly moralistic sense, mind
you) may contribute to the life of art? An affirmative
answer to this question is given in the East, and we will
take that answer to be our fundamental inspiration for
this inquiry.
[2] In their book on physics, Einstein and
Infeld wrote: “In our endeavor to understand reality
we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the
mechanism of a closed watch. He sees the face and the
moving hands, even hears it ticking, but he has no way of
opening the case. If he is ingenious he may form some
picture of a mechanism which could be responsible for all
the things he observes, but he may never be quite sure
his picture is the only one which could explain his
observations. He will never be able to compare his
picture with the real mechanism and he cannot even
imagine the possibility or the meaning of such a
comparison.”
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