Melted Honey: Sax and Sex
KEYWORDS: phenomenology, corporeality, food, penetration,
sensuality, musicality
Introduction
This paper deals with the multisensory processes of engaging and
disengaging with a musical world through the body. It is based on ethnographic
research with an Australian police band. Band members make a strict distinction
between rehearsal and performance. For band members, rehearsals are
characterised by a multisensory disengagement with their instruments. During
rehearsals, which entail a close multisensory focusing in on the points at which
instrument body and musician body met, the senses of touch, sight, and hearing
are engaged in the process of s urveillance. Such surveillance is undertaken in
order that the musicians can identify faulty touches to their instruments that
result in faulty sounds. Touch to the instrument body is ‘Svatched,” not only
with the eye, but also in and through the touch and hearing senses. These sensual
combinations serve to separate person and instrument. In contrast, performances
are characterised by a multisensual embodiment of the instrument, to the point
that band members understand themselves to be constructed of instruments, and
that instruments are constructed of them. In performances, instruments and
performers come to phenomenologically complete one another’s bodies.
Band members discuss the sensually experienced distinction between
rehearsal and performance by means of a distinction between fucking (which
they understood as similar to rehearsal) and making love (which they understood
to be similar to performance experience). Band members also drew on
food/music metaphors, including the difference between constructing a musical
dish from a recipe (the written music) and tasting the melted honey of performed
sax sounds. They used this metaphor to describe the sensual difference between
making sound in rehearsal, and the corporeally penetrative act of inviting a sax
into the body in musical performance.
Using the distinction between rehearsal and performance, and the
penetrative metaphors that band members used to describe it, I draw on and
extend the critiques that Michel Serres made of Merleau-Pontian
phenomenology to analyse rehearsal and performance moments as, respectively,
multisensory processes of surveillance and anti-surveillance.
Ethnographic Context
Rehearsal and performance moments are experienced by band members
as distinctly different moments, owing to the different sensual and corporeal
engagements with instruments that each entails. Essentially, rehearsals are