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 27
In the next point
of reference, the East and the West diverge notably in
their approach. For the East, the void is not something
that simply precedes Creation, as it is in the Bible. In
the traditional eastern view of things, Creation happens
not just once but innumerable times on a constantly
recurring basis.[1] And, according to the Chinese sages of
antiquity, in the moment of suspense before the beginning
of each new cycle of Creation, "the superior man is
careful in the differentiation of things, so that each
finds its place."[2]
The traditions of
the East view the void as something that is coexistent
with the here and now. In fact, in many eastern
religions, meditation is put forward as a means of
entering into the void, and this fact should of course
immediately give us pause in view of the method that we
have been following in this inquiry. According to the
eastern theory of meditation, one best pinpoints the
origins of one’s own identity from the vantage-point
of the void. You may, therefore, have to enter into the
void, in meditation, if you are to discover whom you were
before you knew your own name.
But in order to
do this, westerners first have to overcome an instinctual
resistance that is based on what for them seems to be a
fundamental ethical dilemma. When Buddhists and
Christians sit down together, the latter almost
invariably come around to questioning the so-called
“quietism” of the East. The Christian imagines
that the Buddhist, in entering into the meditative void,
sinks into a kind of anaesthetic stupor, like a warm hot
bath in which he indolently washes away all the cares of
the world. There is just enough truth in this to create
an obstacle to a real appreciation of the place of
meditation in eastern life. Suffice to say, the easterner
has no instinctive prejudice against the void, and this
is difficult for us to understand. When we say that
“nature abhors the vacuum” we really mean that,
as westerners, we abhor the vacuum.
In the West, an
authoritative universe is presumed, and we say that an
all-powerful God in-formed the void at the moment
of Creation, by bringing order out of the chaos of her
many disparate elements. God’s divine will gave form
to elements whose abundant proliferation is presupposed
to have existed in a state of dumb (uniformed) sterility
before the event. Before creation, all of the natural
elements were, in the deepest sense of the word,
incoherent.
A great wit
suggested that God’s first words must have been,
“One has to draw the line somewhere.” In the
western view, we don’t have to worry about the void
now, because God gave final form to the Universe at the
moment of Creation. He made all the necessary
distinctions between light and dark, big and small, good
and bad, I and thou - and these are the given
“laws” of our existence forevermore. If the
truth be told, the West has no very great liking for
ambiguity, for doubt, for the merely provisional. It
likes, shall we say, the cut and dry. Is this why, to the
eastern ear, much of our western music sounds somewhat
martial in spirit? Are its sonic certainties too
bombastic and belligerent? Do our rhythms tend to the
relentless, and are they overly determined?
[1] Joseph Needham has demonstrated that
westerners read more into this notion than can properly
be imputed to it. The Chinese sense of time is not
incompatible with notions of progress of evolution.
(Needham’s multi-volume study, Science and
Civilization in China, is one of the greatest
achievements in the history of letters. In its pages we
learn that practically everything we have thought and
said about China in the West has been false.)
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