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 37
Life as reflected
in our western arts necessarily conforms to the situation
we find ourselves in socially and psychologically, even
if the artist characteristically and necessarily takes a
critical attitude to such an unpoetic state of affairs.
The fact is that, in traditional western art, despite the
artist’s efforts to break free of it as a formal
precondition of all thought and action, there is always a
dominating tendency to emphasize the foreground as
against the background.
This presumes of
course that, first, the necessary distinctions are made
with regard to both content and the material medium of
art – and this must be done on a very firm basis. In
fact, this is just what we find. In western music, for
example, rules are as common as they are in every other
sphere of our highly organized life. And these aesthetic
rules are taken very seriously.[1] Only in
the west have we seen a despised musical interval labeled
“diabolus.”[2] And there
is a long tradition of aesthetic certainty in these
matters, a certainty which is however always changing in
its specifics and particulars. Each generation has its
own rules, but views those rules as final and eternal.
Inevitably, these rules lead to repeated rebellions,
which are, of course, bitterly and viciously contested.
Even at this late date in our own revolutionary era of
music, which commenced with the turn of the last century,
to flout the rules of tonality is practically to curse
God and the Good. How significant it is that rebellion as
such is scarcely relevant to eastern arts. In the East,
artists inhabit their traditions without feeling them as
straightjackets. But in the West, the great artist is
always at war with convention. More will be said of this
later, but now let us consider the way in which artists,
having made their rules, and as a matter of cultural
conditioning, tend to view the difference between the
foreground and the background.
Consider first
the placement of the subject. The artistic subject in
western art is placed in the artistic foreground defined
by the overall frame. The very concept of a frame is more
central to western than to eastern art. It is the
equivalent of the proscenium in the theatre, which marks
out the spectacle from everything that surrounds it. The
frame creates the illusion of the window on life that is
basic to western art. It defines the range of our
conscious spotlight of attention. The frame is the
artist’s emblem of authority. And the public museum,
which originated quite naturally in the West, is the
frame of frames.
Artists today may
tend to loose sight of this fact, since in our narrow
personal experience, many of us have been influenced by
developments in the art of the twentieth century, which
is in many respects a history of the rebellion against
the dominion of the foreground - and the frame. Modern
art often literally dispensed with the frame, replacing
ornately gilded and sculptured wood or plaster with
insignificant little protective strips of metal or
plastic.
What is placed in
the frame in traditional western art is, of course,
whatever may be in the foreground of the artist’s
vision. This was viewed as a matter of moral import,
which has meant that only a very narrow view of life has
ever been permitted in the frame (in the words of the New
York Times, “all the news fit to print”). The
modern artist has attempted to break out of that
constrictive moral frame, but in this respect, she is
only participating in a broad social project involving
many fields and disciplines. The breakdown of the frame
may be viewed as the categorical meaning of our time.
Every facet of life has experienced it to one degree or
another. Art has in some cases anticipated, and in others
followed upon, similar developments in other areas, such
as science. The Cubists were an astonishing example of
anticipation, giving pictorial hints of the world that
Einstein described mathematically. They in effect
exploited new conceptions about the relativity of time
and space, and this made it more difficult if not always
impossible to determine foregrounds and backgrounds in
their paintings. They were looking at things from every
angle at once, and implying if not actually employing a
multitude of simultaneous frames (of reference).
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