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 56
Artists are
idealists. Our lives are devoted to the realization of a
state of perfection completely purged of human error.
Some of the finest musicians detest the concert hall
because they find fault with every performance. There are
musicians who perform without hearing anything but their
own mistakes. They are trained as a matter of
professional pride to focus on those mistakes with
relentless determination to be rid of them. The role of
the Ego in this process is manifold because it takes
possession of those mistakes. Being things, they are
things for the Ego, and they belong to it.
Here speaks the
Ego: “I am Johnny Violin, and I am playing my Bach
for the Board of Review. I place my bow on the strings
and begin the lovely notes, and… Oh! What was that?
A wrong note. MY wrong note! Damn! How did it sneak into
my performance. I played so flawlessly this very morning.
I must be more careful. I must try harder. Oh, oh!!! And
what was that? Another wrong note! Now they are adding
up. If I am not careful, there will be a third. OOOPS!
There it was. Be careful! Pay attention! Oh, my God, now
I think I skipped a whole phrase. CAREFUL!!! ATTENTION!!!
Why is my arm so tight? Why am I shaking? What am I
playing? Where am I?"
A voice from the
darkened hall says in lowered tones: "Thanks. Don't
call us: we'll call you. Next!"
This is, all too
often, the way we make music in the West! No one can deny
the outstanding excellence that may result from an
intense concentration on formal perfection. But, the
issue here has nothing to do with ultimate achievements.
We need to consider only if similar achievements could be
produced in a more humane fashion. One can surely
appreciate Beethoven without also approving of the way in
which his drunken and abusive father beat him and made
him stand at the piano (still too small to sit),
throughout the night, in endless hours of grueling
practice and torture. Must we really always make martyrs
of our artists? Our adulation is poor payment for the
pointless passions we subject them to.
The average
musician is conditioned in this atmosphere to completely
loose sight of his higher purpose. He is there to express
something, not to measure a distance between the strings
of his instrument. If he plays a difficult passage that
he hasn’t yet mastered, he plays it sotto voce,
hoping that it will not be noticed. There are orchestras
in which whole ensembles of sotto voce’s make
the heroics of Beethoven or Strauss into a patter of
frightened kittens.
Is the musical
recording engineered in the studio without mistakes
preferable to the fallible music that is made by a living
and breathing musician in the concert hall? Are we so
certain life would be better without imperfections? The
newly made violin or cello appears with unblemished
varnish. But it may lack the seasoned and enduring beauty
that can be found in the old instruments with all their
gashes and burns and sweat marks. Many craftsmen
"antique" their newly made instruments for just
this reason (that is, not necessarily to defraud). Which
has the more intense beauty? The face marked by a
lifetime of struggle, through which a deep spirit shines,
or the symmetrically perfect mask on the cover of Vogue?
If you wonder how easterners differ from westerners in
their answers to questions like these, consider the art
of the traditional Japanese Tea Ceremony, where chipped
and cracked crockery can elicit the profoundest praise.
All that may be changing now. With the industrialization
of the world, their factories like ours are now turning
everything out in plastics, and plastics are even
appearing in our art, because plastics are perfect in
their own way – uniformly dull. We need Krishna to
tell us, as He told Arjuna, “Human endeavors are
riddled with imperfections, as smoke with fire.”
It is no doubt a
part of our human nature to reject the imperfections in
reality. Utopia is not wholly unknown in the East, but
our point here is that the West makes a nightmarish
obsession of it. It is as natural to admire the flawless
diamond as it is to strive relentlessly after our
illusive ideals. But by seeking a perfection that we do
not have, we risk losing sight of a far deeper perfection
that we do have, a perfection that resides within us only
slightly hidden. Thus, there are two kinds of perfection:
the perfection of the Ego, and the perfection of the
Self. The former is a perfection of parts. But the
perfection of the Self is of the whole. It is hard for
the Ego to understand that it is commensurate with the
perfection of Nature as a whole. This is why the Ego
suspects love and resists it. In the eyes of love,
everything is beautiful. Did a lover ever see an ugly
sunset? Where may she find the landscape that
doesn’t have its own unique beauty? Where should she
find the imperfect constellations among the stars?
The photographer
Ansel Adams was also a musician. At a party that he
remembered as “very liquid” he played a
Nocturne by Chopin with something less than perfection.
According to Adams, one hand played in F while the other
played in F-sharp, and he could do nothing to bring them
together. Afterwards, he was told, “You never missed
a wrong note.” That is a kind of perfection in
itself. Naturally, the Ego sees it with some dismay, but
the Self cannot be terribly exercised over it except
possibly in amusement. (Next Page)
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