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 3
This accounts
for the high degree of “aestheticization” of
Western arts, the preciousness that infects
society’s attitudes to artists and their work. One
is reminded of the artistic sensibilities of the
antebellum matrons who were Huckleberry’s foils, but
it is more embarrassing in our own progressive urbanity.
It was comic when, practically at the birth of the avant-garde,
“open-minded” art lovers glommed on to the
dazzling whiteness in the porcelain of Marcel
Duchamp’s “Fountain,” at the notorious
Armory Show in Paris at the dawn of the 20th
century (this piece consisted of a common and everyday
urinal mounted on a pedestal). Epater les bourgeousie -
if you can!
By contrast,
the idealistic bent of the East has resulted in a
persistently stronger emphasis on the active element in
the arts - on the process of production itself, rather
than on the product, however conceived and received. In
the West, the essence of life was found in consumption:
in the East, in creation. This is why the Indian master
musician is as much guru as entertainer, and the Japanese
water-colorist teaches much more than the qualities of
pigment, the textures of paper, and the subtleties of
form.
No
black-and-white distinctions are possible or intended.
Master musicians of the European tradition also teach
infinitely more than mere matters of craft. Their intense
devotion to art in itself is something that imparts a
spiritual dimension beyond all concern for mere
productivity and worldly success. Nonetheless it may be
said that, in the East, the arts do not exist so fully in
their own right as they do in the West, never conceived
in terms of “art for art's sake.” The arts
there are not so thoroughly divorced from their sacred
origins in worship and spiritual development.
Consequently, in Japan, the tea ceremony and flower
arrangement are treated practically as arts coequal with
painting and music. Why? Precisely because they serve
just as well for the purpose of shedding light on the
essential question of every real artist in any kind of
art: to wit, “Who am I?”
Spiritual
enlightenment is defined here as attaining to a
consciousness and experience of essential reality, by
means of an examination of one’s own identity. This
presents a more complex matter than is immediately
apparent (which is why the idea of spiritual
enlightenment is usually surrounded with a haze of
mystery and esotericism). In this book, therefore, the
distinction between the “Self” and the
“Ego” will be a central theme. It will be seen
that conventional pedagogy in western music is not
specifically interested in defining and realizing the
Self. Rather it relies on training a reduced image of the
Self that we will define as the Ego. For the Ego is more
susceptible to the most overtly voluntary or willful
aspects of consciousness, and these always are
predominant in the mentality of the West, no matter the
question or issue. The West is the land of the Ego, the
East is the land of the Self. (Next Page)
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