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 9
Part One
The Ego and the Self
Chapter One
Like the Sun that
shines on all, spiritual enlightenment is a thing that
all cultures claim. Culture itself may be described as a
form of human enlightenment. It is based on enlightenment
and it gives rise to it. But this book is an inquiry into
a very specific and characteristic kind of enlightenment,
especially as it is associated with and revealed in the
high arts of the cultures of the East. We should like to
find out if, as westerners, we can learn from the East a
new way of looking at the arts and at ourselves as
artists.
In a word, we are
going see if we can spiritualize our experience as
artists in a new way. Our own history in the arts has
been a course of ever-increasing professionalism in which
the actual artifact, the artistic product of our work,
assumes paramount place and importance. This may be
called a de-spiritualization, or materialization, of our
lives as artists.
We ought to
remind ourselves of our own cultural origins, considering
how they may have promised a different outcome than what
we have actually found. Plato described a Universe in
which beauty reflected the Good, which was the source and
reality of all things. In his Symposium, the Good
appears as the supreme beauty, at the summit of a climb
that is made by us in a devotional pilgrimage of love.
According to the philosopher, our love for beauty awakens
us to a mystical contemplation of the Good. We begin with
eros, which is love for the physical beauty of the
sexes, but the ultimate object is eternal beauty. We
progress from our love of the body, to our love of the
kindred soul. From there we go on further to the
beautiful abstractions of philosophy and science, and
thence forward to our final goal: perfect union with
supercosmic beauty. This last is the origin of all the
beauties that preceded it, the ultimate Form of the Good.
Plato taught us
that our love of beauty gives the soul its means of
access to its own high estate. We seem to have become
confused on this point, and have fallen into a thicket of
aesthetic quandaries and uncertainties with regard to our
role as artists. It is remarkable how much energy was
expended in the last century, for example, arguing over
“art for art’s sake,” for never was there
a more vacuous debate in all the history of human
letters.
It is not such a
stretch to equate Plato’s Form of the Good, with the
“Tao” of traditional Chinese philosophy. One of
the founders of that philosophy, Lao Tzu, called it the
“Way of Heaven.” In a “Tao of Music”
we are posing our love for the arts as a way of attaining
to a realization of that same high goal. We are
suggesting a spiritual force that gives life, meaning and
significance to the material forms of art, just as it
does to the material forms of life, and thereby connects
our work as artists with a universal and cosmic
principle. And at the very beginning of this inquiry, we
must understand that this principle must be active in the
artist before the work is ever attempted. This is
absolutely fundamental to the entire discussion that
follows, and it will become more and more evident as we
proceed.
In one of the
oldest commentaries on the art of painting in China,
“Six Principles” of correct procedure are
defined. In the first of these, we are given “Spirit
Resonance (or Vibration of Vitality) and Life
Movement.”[1]The connection drawn here between Spirit and
Movement must not be overlooked. Art and music are
functions, in this view, of a Resonance or Vibration that
exists between Sprit and Movement. This explains very
simply the spontaneity and freedom that are the marks of
highest achievement in the East, whether in the arts, per
se, or in the greater art of life. Deliberation and even
thought have no part in the fully artistic act as it is
experienced in the East. Flowers bloom and artists make
art. It is a simple as that.
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