Melted Honey; Sax and Sex
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transubstantiation, which Serres prefers to read through the action of cooking
rather than alchemy, therefore not as refinement or purification, but as the work
of combination or alloying substance.”^^
Band members talk about the ways that a musical instrument voices
smell and taste. Taste and smell are not discussed as “straight” senses, but are
infused with other sensual characteristics. Trumpet sounds, for example, are said
to taste like melted gold. Flautists know that flute sounds are, as Lanier once
said, “half song, half odour . . . as if a rose might somehow be a throat.”
Trumpeters know that trumpet sounds are strong, certain, arrogant, glorious,
proud, clear, and yellow; and saxophone sounds taste “like melted honey.”
Band members use all of the senses, excepting vision, to comment on
the sensual/corporeal realities they encounter during performance, easily
interchanging such phrases as “those sounds tasted so sweet” with “that came
right from my guts” or “my sax was puffing out truly sweet scents.” Taste that
reaches out to encounter sound-food, touch that begins not at the hand but down
in the guts and then reaches out to instrument through breath, and delightful
olfactory visits with wafting sax-smells all combine not to mix sensual
metaphors, but to mix them into one sensory knot experienced during
performance.
Multisensuality in Rehearsal
If performances are multisensory experiences, then so too are
rehearsals. During rehearsals, band members peer down at their fingers as they
manipulate instrument surfaces, subjecting them to visual surveillance. Let us
return momentarily to William’s tongue. William’s tongue is under surveillance,
but William cannot, of course, view his own tongue. Tongues are here
visualised; band members routinely subject the parts of their bodies that they
cannot see to a kind of quasi-visual or touch/seen surveillance. Vision is
combined with touch-sense, as the fingers are watched with the eyes and the
tongue and the fingers that cannot be seen with the eye are watched through
touch. Hearing is also heavily implicated in the surveillance that band members
make on their touch. Band members are busy focusing their attention to thentouch on the instrument body, which they attempt to make technically correct by
surveilling their hearing. Correct touches produce correct sound, and a fierce
surveilling of soimd indicates that technically incorrect touch has occurred.
Hearing, as I have said, is busy listening to itself, and is not deafened to itself, as
it is habitually, but at the same moment, hearing is also surveilling touch, just as
vision is surveilling touch. Rehearsals involve a direction of the senses to the
multiplicity of points at which a player meets instrument, in touch, hearing, and
vision, but smell and taste are conspicuously absent. Band members cannot taste
or smell the music they make in rehearsals, which leads me back to the
descriptions that band members make of rehearsals as “recipes.”