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 44
The consciousness
reflected in the attitudes of eastern art has been
similarly entrenched from the earliest days. Since these
attitudes are demonstrably different from those in the
West, people have long speculated as to their fundamental
cause or raison d’être. We will not concern
ourselves with the why’s and wherefore’s, and
simply note that, in all places and times, artistic
vision is based on something anterior – that is, a
very particular sense of art in relation to Nature.
In the West, we
have a commanding desire to put Art (or more properly,
artifice) in the foreground, and Nature in the
background. Artifice is man’s refuge from Nature.
Hawthorne’s America found the Devil in the
wilderness, and this was astonishing to the Native
American for whom the world was an enchanted garden. If
the western man does not actually loathe Nature, he is
with a certainty out to conquer it. The bulldozer and the
missile ought to appear on the united flag of the
industrialized world, since for us they express the
essence of our attitude to the world. There is nothing
sacred about it. The numinous glow that a more natural
man finds in Nature is invisible to us. In our cultural
heart of hearts, we think Nature ugly, in the sense of
needing to be confined, and cleaned up if possible.
Useless and pesky phenomena abound everywhere. Nature is
a tumble and jumble of things, with no straight lines, no
perfect planes. We are committed to
“development” of the wild, taming it, isolating
it, managing it.
Since Aristotle,
art has been regarded intellectually as an
“imitation of Nature” but there has been more
abstract assumption and thoughtless lip service in this
ideal than there is real truth. The West has been far too
enamoured of formal and abstract symmetry to appreciate
Nature on its own terms. Symmetry appeals to our desire
(nay, compulsion) for order and reason. In the early 18th
century, when order and reason were coming into their
glory, a Bishop Burnet was so strenuously perturbed by
the unsymmetrical patterns limned by the stars that he
took the Creator to task for his want of skill.
“What a beautiful hemisphere they would have
made,’ he averred, “if they had been placed in
rank and order; if they had all been disposed in regular
figures… all finished and made up into one fair
piece, or great composition, according to the rules of
art and symmetry.”
What rankles the
objective mind is the susceptibility of western culture
to a sham and contrived order and reason that are, in the
end, pure fancy. The beauty of the Golden Section and the
Fibonacci Series notwithstanding, symmetry is but one,
and by no means the most significant, aspect of Nature.
It is in the foreground of our western drawing of the
cosmic canvas, but we are gradually coming to see that
far more profound in its implications is the background
of Nature’s asymmetry. Thus, in the physicist Steven
Hawking’s view of the Universe, for example,
everything evolved out of an original and perfectly
symmetrical “Singularity” - but this happened
only after a tiny asymmetry expressed itself in the
fabric of reality, like a missed stitch. The asymmetry is
the significant thing. We might compare it to the
“Pythagorean Comma,” which as a measure of the
miniscule asymmetry in the musical tone given by Nature
(in its infinite series of overtones) might account for
the whole genesis of music. Thus, the disruptive
asymmetry in the natural musical tone evokes our own
creative will, and this results in the rational order of
musical harmony. Order, in this view, is not given by
Nature, but by ourselves. But ideas like these are still
only gradually being introduced into the consciousness of
the West. To this day, we continue as a culture to behave
as if Nature’s asymmetries are too much for us. (Next Page)
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