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 45
In some of the
earliest commentaries on the differences between Japanese
and western arts, it was noted that in Japan formal
symmetry has been much less highly prized – if
indeed it is valued in its own right at all. The love of
asymmetry in Japanese art is first of all a love of the
shapes, colors, and contours of Nature. On its most basic
level, it arises out of a reluctance to put Nature, and
its asymmetries, into the background. In the Japanese
house, the garden is practically incorporated into the
plan as another room[1], and the
structural flexibility of the overall construction allows
for greater access to the outdoors. The gentle climate
permits thinner walls, and the sounds of wild birds are
as easily heard inside as outside.
In western
architecture, the building stands as a monument to
man’s defiance of gravity. In the traditional
architecture of Japan, even the use of nails is viewed as
a disgrace. There, wood is notched and grooved just so
that gravity itself holds everything together without
nails or glue. The architect doesn’t impose his
will; he insinuates it. Neither art nor man is conceived
in opposition to Nature. Extreme mass is mostly a modern
innovation, and the traditional Japanese structure merges
with its landscape in a loving intimacy. Not so, the
western building. Standing on cleared land, it literally
obliterates its background. Its symmetries create a thing
unto itself, of-for-and-by itself. It does not depend on
a particular view of Mt. Fuji to compliment
asymmetrically whatever formal symmetries might otherwise
be desired in the construction.[2]
The elegant
Japanese art of rock gardening bases itself on a highly
cultivated sensitivity to the formal perfection of
Nature, in which there is always and everywhere a formal
equality between foreground and background. Here the
artist creates vistas devoid of exclusively outstanding
and dominating features. In these exquisitely abstract,
and asymmetrical, creations made out of pebbles and
stones, the eye is pleased to see everything within the
parameter of the garden as part of a singular and organic
whole.
Likewise, a love
for asymmetry and a great sensitivity to the background
is the hallmark of the traditional Japanese watercolor,
where the ostensible subject may appear in a small part
of one corner of the page. This happens not as the result
of ineptitude, as in the amateur snapshots described
above, but as a matter of sharp calculation on the part
of the artist. An empty field of white may be in itself
every bit as interesting as is the ostensible subject of
the painting. It too has a shape and a texture.[3] Japanese artists are uniquely attuned to
these things, although, unlike westerners, they have
never established schools in which, on the one hand,
shapes are considered pre-eminent, and on the other,
color. Such distinctions have very little interest for
people who instinctively integrate the elements of their
world rather than obsessively distinguishing between
them.
Much was made in
the above discussion about the role of the frame in
western art, and the rebellion against it in modern
times. In eastern art the frame is not important enough
to rebel against. There is a greater sensitivity to space
in eastern art, and specifically the space of the
background, because in life itself, as it is lived in the
East, the frame is considered essentially arbitrary. This
should not be so difficult for us to imagine. When you
stand on a high vista and look out over a wide panorama,
do you place frames around the points you are attracted
to?
[1] And in traditional Japan, even the smallest
houses had gardens.
[2] Of course, this is one area in which a
shrinking world has had its effects in all directions at
once. It is not hard to imagine that Frank Lloyd
Wright’s sojourn in Japan contributed to his
sensitivity to a buildings physical environment, which
was so distinctive about his work, and which also gave it
such a distinctly eastern flavor. But who can match the
true master of the eastern architectural vision in our
time – I. M. Pei? His Hancock tower is a mirror, his
pyramid at the Louvre transparent. And yet, Tokyo today
is a catastrophe of western architecture imposed on a
once sublime scene of harmonized natural and civilized
splendor.
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