Melted Honey; Sax and Sex
53
necessary and imreflected upon. This is the certainly the case during the habitual
taking of breaths, but it is not the case during rehearsals, where respiration is
under surveillance.
When I first heard band members describe the difference between
rehearsals and performances in terms of “making technical sounds” in the case
of the former and “turning into an instrument” in the latter, I longed, just for a
moment, to clear up the whole matter by furtively lurking in the wings as the
band members performed, camcorder in hand, in order to catch a glimpse of the
transformation as the metal of the trumpet slowly crept up the fingers at the
player’s Midas-like touch. In the next moment, I came to realise that what the
band members said sounded so strange because they were articulating something
so taken for granted, so routinely unreflected upon, that it is hardly ever
articulated outside the bounds of phenomenological work, except, of course, in
metaphor. When players say that instruments become part of them and that they
become part of instruments during performances, they are merely commenting
on the sensual/corporeal logic they encounter as their fingers and tongues
proceed beyond the point at which the tuba begins in the same way that I
routinely fail to recognise the point at which my fingers meet the typewriter
keys. In performance, band members don’t feel the points at which their tongues
and fingers meet instrument, but feel themselves extended into their instrument.
The fact that band members also hear performance and rehearsal
sounds very differently, while I did not, indicates the marked difference in the
sensual experiences of these moments. Band members very often remarked that
they could not hear music during rehearsals, insisting instead that they could
only hear their noisy productions one discrete musical sound at a time. This is
easily explained if we consider that hearing itself is placed under surveillance in
rehearsal. Band members are forced to pay attention to the single notes that they
are required to play according to the score. Each note is carefully surveilled for
the purposes of judging its technical correctness according to the prescriptions
made for each single note in the score. This is akin to listening to each tiny letter
component part of a word, which is something that is never done in the
unreflected upon act of conversing; we must constantly disattend the sound
components that make up conversation if we are to speak with everyday
competence and coherence. Conversation is, therefore (as Katz constantly
insists) a kind of disattended singing, taking place well below self-conscious
awareness. Even while the speaker articulates single noises, the listener may run
them together into the lines of a familiar song. In other words, the band
members and I each attended to different characteristics of the same
conversation.
Multisensuality
The analysis of the ethnographic material is obviously grounded in
Merleau-Pontian phenomenology at its most fundamental level, in that I take the