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 41
But, already in
the 1970s, Pierre Boulez was writing about the
unsuitability of the concert hall for the presentation of
new music. The concert hall, he pointed out, was designed
for a specific set of instruments that were designed to
express the artistic purposes of the 18th and
19th centuries. Music, said the composer, had
long since acquired other artistic purposes that cried
out for fulfillment in new venues and styles of
performance. He declared the concert hall obsolete, but
Boulez’s efforts, both polemical and practical in
his role as music director of various established
institutions, were to prove wholly ineffectual. Even now,
vast sums of desperately scarce funds for music continue
to be squandered in opulent and antiquated (but highly
“modern”) structures that properly belong to
another culture in another time and place. Just as
tonality itself is kept on life-support, so too is the
concert hall. For this reason, Frank O. Gehry’s new
museum in Seattle, a truly modern structure (the
“Experience Music Project”), must be judged a
triumph for the way it signifies the musical dilemma of
our time. This building is as fully in harmony with its
social environment, as is Frank Lloyd Wright’s
“Falling Waters” with its physical environment.
But that is not to say that it provides any satisfactory
answer to the questions that plague the musical arts in
America. The “Experience Music Project” takes
the form of a gigantic guitar, smashed through at the
middle.
Gehry’s
building reflects the way in which life is transforming
art. It reflects a mere hint of the future that we can
hardly yet characterize, even if we can see that it is
not going to be to our liking. For the most part,
however, to whatever extent artists have challenged the
culture’s predetermined proclivities, modern
developments have remained entirely peripheral, i.e. in
the background, to the mainstream expression of
appreciation for the arts in our time. The futility of
the modern artist’s life is summed up perfectly in
Picasso’s words, “First I make it, and then
other people make it pretty.” The success, in fact,
of most contemporary artistic attempts to reformulate the
conditions of human consciousness have, with rare
exceptions, been dismissed in their societal milieu as
incomprehensible at best, and demented at worst. Whatever
could not be suppressed has been co-opted and retrieved
for mass culture through essential distortion.
At any rate, the
traditional and still dominant western approach is still
a matter of putting subjects pretty squarely into the
foreground of the image. How interesting it is, in fact,
to notice the various ways in which this principle works
– not with a mind to saying anything definitive
about it, but simply as a curious way of categorizing the
essential angle of vision that may be taken in any given
work of art.
First of all,
however, we must exercise some discretion. In medieval
art, time is not unitary in the Aristotelian sense. A
single canvas may place its subject, say Jesus, in
various stations of the Cross. Historical dramas are
played out on the canvas in successive scenes. Secondly,
the positioning of the work in its intended physical
place – i.e. high or low with respect to the eye of
the beholder - often alters the sense in which the
positioning of the subject in the painting may be
assessed. (Next
Page)
|
