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 40
From another
angle, Cage reckoned that human expressiveness in itself
was the culprit of the age. Better to leave all human
values unspoken, including both the rational and the
irrational (but especially the former), replacing them
ideally with silence. Whether the silence was literal, or
only one of the “material” elements employed,
Cage endeavored to create an empty space into which
something not human might interject a note or two.
Ironically,
however, these two composers, Webern and Cage, also
served inadvertently the very gods they rebelled against.
It is not easy to escape one’s cultural
proclivities. Webern and Cage, twins in a curious dance
around the maypole of musical innovation, each in his own
way carried on with a very particular and specific
interest, which was put very much in the artistic
foreground of their works. Then, in the years that
followed, total serialization in the music of
Webern’s followers, and the total incorporation of
chance into the music of Cage and his followers - albeit
two diametrically opposed compositional procedures -
resulted in two kinds of music that to most listeners
sounded indistinguishable the one from the other. This
may be taken as an emblem of their success in breaking
down at least the listener’s frame of reference with
respect to music in general, either as organized sound or
not. But, despite this achievement, these two composers
also demonstrated that it is not yet within the western
dispensation to admit or understand that contingency and
freedom, and all other dualities, are always two poles of
one and the same magnet, each phasing in and out of the
foreground and background, as the moment dictates, but
each coequal in the sphere of existence. In western music
and art, the spotlight of focused consciousness has for
the most part refused to tolerate paradox and
uncertainty. This is possibly more true than ever with
the advent of our highly politicized conceptual and
performance arts. Whatever the western artist places in
the foreground, whether it be truth, beauty, love, or
even chance, mischief, and hate, it must be had alone,
sovereign and uncorrupted.
The persistence
of the conventional western attitude in the art of music
is exemplified by the ongoing life of the concert hall
– the equivalent of the physical frame in plastic
arts. Like the museum, the concert hall was a western
idea. If it is true, as some people claim, that a
“Mozart Effect” can be observed and measured
(by which children bring coherence to their brainwaves
and thereby improve their scores on math exams simply by
listening to the music of Mozart beforehand) then it may
be wondered if a social-historical effect of the same
kind can be discerned as well. We know that in
Mozart’s day, people could hardly bring themselves
to sit quietly during one of his performances. Nor were
they expected to. There may have been some hitherto
unexpected and very salutary dividend that flowed out of
his invention of the public concert. Gradually, it taught
people to sit still. But, in any case, the disciplined
attention that the concert hall invites is certainly not
out of keeping with a general cast of mind of our western
world. In our conception, there are things worth
listening to, and things that are not. Doctor’s
prescriptions, President’s speeches, and
Mozart’s music are universally regarded as worth
listening to. The rest is controversial. The very
structure of the concert hall embodies the whole
principle of propriety: it encloses the good within, and
shuts the bad out. (Next Page)
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