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 39
But other frames
were broken without the help of outside influences, and
indeed almost without any conscious sense of purpose in
breaking them. Tonality, itself, the frame of frames in
music, broke down through the elaboration of its own
processes. As soon as composers deemed it right to begin
in one key and end in another, the game was up. It took
some time for its internal cohesiveness to dissolve
completely, but the process was inexorable. In the end,
the frame was busted and couldn’t be put together
again – except in mannerist pretense, of course, as
it is today.
Within what was
left of the frame, composers began to question our
ordinary perception of musical foreground and background.
The entire period from Haydn to Schoenberg,
approximately, was devoted to a blurring of the
distinction between a foreground theme and background
development. In Classical Music, narrowly defined, the
theme stands out just as the painterly subject stands out
in the work of the pictorial classicist, David, whose
subjects are almost invariably centered in the frame. But
after this brief period of perfect poise and centered
certainty, composers felt an irresistible desire to
expand the boundaries of development. And, in this, they
were opposed and even denounced by society at every step
along the way. Mozart of course wrote too many notes.
Beethoven’s developments were too long.
Nevertheless, by the time of Wagner, everything is
developmental melody. In this very same spirit,
Schoenberg’s “Ervartung” upped the ante,
and brought into question the seemingly inescapable
necessity for a specific motif or theme in the first
place. In the bulk of his music, even his singular
devotion to counterpoint never quite obliterated the
distinction between melody and accompaniment, which is
another kind of foreground and background. But his
textures became so complex that he had to mark his scores
with an informative “Hauptstimme” for the sake
of the musicians, just in case.
A different kind
of straining against traditional definitions may be
discerned in radical and revolutionary attempts to
integrate the final and ultimate background of sound -
i.e. silence - into the musical composition, giving it a
structural purpose and meaning quite unlike the
conventional rest. The new attitude was to be found
expressed best in the tendencies emerging from the music
of Anton Webern and John Cage, the latter being directly
influenced himself by eastern art and Zen in particular.
First there was
the psychological silence that is the product of
abstraction. Geometry has no moral baggage associated
with it, and this was its principal attraction for people
who began to tire of imposing meaning onto things. They
lost faith in the loud and grand musical pronouncements
of Wagner and the Wagnerians. The Late Romantics, in art
and in social history, brought every word of “The
True, The Good, and The Beautiful” into disrepute.
The impotence of art to make men good, and the service
both art and language rendered to evil, were all too
apparent. For Webern, and Stravinsky too, the surreal
elevation of the subconscious, with its welter of new and
unsuspected meanings, was of no interest whatsoever. The
possibility of cutting through false and irrational
meanings to deeper truths no longer inspired faith. If
words and music are abstract, at least they cannot be
used for perverted purposes. Thus, Webern, the Modernist,
in much of his music, banished every whim and whiff of
fake romantic fancy and sentiment. That in itself was an
attack against the clarity of partisan distinctions
between the rights and wrongs so violently felt on all
sides. We cannot respond in a clearly defined way to the
abstractions of Webern’s Symphony (or, for that
matter, to one of Mozart’s symphonies). Abstraction
is the artistic equivalent of political pacifism.(Next Page)
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