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 38
The developments
associated with Freud in medical psychiatry delved into a
very dank and forbidden background of the human psyche,
and this was particularly significant early in the
history of Modernism. The surrealists, for example,
gathered materials from the psychological background of
hallucination and dream. The surreal may prove to be one
of the most enduring innovations in pictorial art of the
20th century, and it is still ubiquitous in
the imagery of the present, both commercial and artistic.
The rich diversity of life in the shadows of our own
nouveau Victorian milieu continues to this day to be a
mighty stimulus to artists who are determined to expand
the realistic frame of art – people such as
Maplethorpe and Serrano. But, extending beyond
surrealism, per se, all modern art attempts to break
through the limited “rational” view of the
world given by ordinary vision, in order to describe a
deeper reality beneath appearances. Kandinsky set the
tone with what his emphasis on what he called “the
Spiritual in Art.”[1]
At the very
beginning of the modern movement in the arts, the whole
premise of a moral frame appeared bankrupt. The Great War
had revealed a brutal “animal” man lurking
behind the gentleman’s façade of cultivation, and
so there seemed no point to the frame beyond civilized
pretence. Expressionists of both music and art abhorred
the lifeless and colorless boredom of a sham existence.
They elaborated increasingly abstract images in which the
foregrounds of representative figuration dissolved into
backgrounds of primal emotion and instinct. The human
face literally became “The Cry.”[2] People were waking up in a completely
unfamiliar world. Nothing was what it had seemed. For the
first time in ages, all definitions were thrown up for
grabs. Artists stopped imposing meanings within clearly
marked frames. The 20th century reflected life
as a chaotic maelstrom of events and experiences. In
literature, James Joyce and William Faulkner wrote in a
dense “stream of consciousness” which
acknowledged no boundaries whatsoever between foreground
and background. Life was presented as “a tale told
by an idiot full of sound and fury signifying
nothing” - in other words, void and without form.[3] Ultimately, every rule and distinction of
signification and meaning was challenged during a century
of intense introspection and questioning.
It must not be
supposed, however, that artists succeeded in breaking out
of the traditional constraints of western vision and
thought. Consider Magritte’s painting of a pipe
under which he placed the words (in French), “This
is not a pipe.” It cannot escape our notice that one
of the most compelling interpretations of this work, with
respect to its influence on other artists, took the
paradoxical statement as a stimulus to a higher, and more
consistent, level of discrimination. In this view, one is
meant to see that a painting cannot be a pipe; it
can’t be used to have a smoke. One thing is a pipe,
and another thing is a painting. In other words, the
painting is not meant to blur the distinctions but to
clarify them more consistently. This is, of course, the
typical western response. Ambiguities are not easily
tolerated in the western mind.
In music, as in
pictorial art, one of the most important frames broken in
the 20th century was the European frame.
Debussy responded to Indonesian music. Puccini responded
to Chinese music. The recognition of the musical
background of the East was a signal event, challenging
even the immutability of the chromatic scale. Bartok
responded to Gypsy music in a direct fashion unlike any
of his predecessors, showing that Gypsy musical culture
was essentially foreign to the European model, even if it
was relatively familiar to the ear. In a similar way,
Stravinsky, Ravel, Milhaud, Gershwin and many others
dealt in the near exotica of Jazz.
[1] Concerning the Spiritual in Art, by
Vasily Kandinsky
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