You play something for your friends, let’s say half a page of a piece by Johann Sebastian Bach. What is your intention? The possibilities are endless. To share, to give, to impose; to be liked by the friend, or to annoy the friend; to honor Bach (the deity of structure and knowledge) or to play with Bach (the deity of invention and pleasure); to make yourself seen and heard, or to disappear into the music itself; to bitterly obey a long-dead parent who insisted that you play when you didn’t want to, or to joyfully disobey the long-dead parent who really wanted you to be a doctor or engineer, not a barefoot musician without a retirement plan; to play beautifully or to play skillfully; to be good, to be better, to be best . . . there are so many possible intentions. And these intentions, in collaboration with your conceptions and perceptions, definitely and absolutely and visibly and audibly shape your actions.
That’s why we quacked.
Early in the workshop we tried to do a little exercise in which our conceptions, perceptions, and intentions conspired against us. It was simple: sing a drone; sustain, as a group, a single unchanging pitch. We were too serious, too tentative, too judgmental, too awkward, too concerned, too invested in doing something elevated, something good, something good! But us humans, with our wonderful contradictions and paradoxes, we can also decide to suddenly change our intentions and conceptions.
We carry, by birth, a feral dimension, spontaneous and free from judgment, a lively energy plentifully demonstrated by babies and children and screaming toddlers, by sports fanatics at a bar watching a match on a big TV screen, by clowns with no fear of ridicule. Simplifying it, we’re able to behave “primordially.” In Paris, after we caught ourselves being timid and critical of ourselves, we decided to become fowl and foul, and we performed, collectively and for our pleasure and delight, a sonata of quacks, a sextet of cock-a-doodles, a symphony of silliness. Our intention to be admirable good boys and girls was overwhelmed by the crescendo poco a poco sempre of screeches, squeaks, clucks, and cha-caws. Then we did a decrescendo poco a poco sempre of these bestial impulses, and we settled into a sweet and sonorous drone, and we took turns singing beautiful melismatic improvisations in tune with the drone. We had arrived at a new conception of good and bad, together with new perceptions and intentions. And we acted as never before.
The quacks had birthed Kyrie Eleison, and the rest of the weekend in Paris was divine.