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 2
Yet that
aspect of the role of music is not the subject of this
book. Instead, it calls on the proposition that peace and
harmony, generally speaking, in the individual and in the
world, is furthered through the development of a more
capacious and profound human consciousness. Socrates
said, “Know thyself.” Thus, we will seek here
the possibility of finding, through a life of music, a
path to the expansion and harmonious integration of all
our various capacities and qualities into one
comprehensive and coherent whole. The premise of this
book is the assertion that in the experience of making
music we learn who we really are, which is the first
prerequisite for living in harmony with the world. And,
while music is viewed here as a path to self-knowledge,
self-knowledge is defined, very simply, as the foundation
of all spiritual enlightenment.
Clearly, music
can be only one path among many of this kind. We will,
however, consider it emblematic of all those paths that
emerge out of the realm of art. In broader terms, this
book is about the connection between art and
enlightenment.
It happens
that the connection between art and enlightenment is not
commonly understood in the West. This was not always so.
But, in the East, neither music nor any of the other arts
has become so removed from the search for spiritual
enlightenment as has been the case in the West at least
since the time when the Holy Roman Church lost its battle
against polyphony. Nor was there as pronounced a split
between church and state, which meant for us a turn in
the arts toward a secular spirit that provides for the
decoration and embellishment of our material lives. In
the present, the specific character of our
“modernity” tends to de-spiritualize the arts,
as it does everything else. The materialist bias of our
culture has turned the arts into a mere exchange of
artifacts.
[NOTE: from
“Orientations,” by Pierre Boulez (Harvard
University Press 1986) “Western thinkers cannot in
future forget that their ideas form no more than a part,
however undeniably important a part, of universal
knowledge, that they possess no unique privilege among
the various developments of the human mind, and that the
supremacy of Western thought was a ludicrous illusion. I
can even speak personally in this matter. When I was a
young man I listened to records of the music of other
civilizations, especially those of Africa and the Far
East. The beauty of this music came as a violent shock to
me, because it was so far removed from our own culture
and so close to my own temperament; but I was quite as
struck by the concepts behind these elaborate works of
art. Nothing, I found, was based on the
‘masterpiece’, on the closed cycle, on passive
contemplation or narrowly aesthetic pleasure. In these
civilizations music is a way of existence in the world of
which it forms an integral part and with which it is
indissolubly linked – an ethical rather than simply
an aesthetic category.] (Next Page)
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