Melted Honey; Sax and Sex
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least in the lived experience of the rehearsing band member; if anything,
instruments are antiseptically and dispassionately regarded.
Band members describe rehearsals as occasions when they produce
exclusively “technical music.” Technical music, according to band members,
refers to the sounds that band members make when they are engaged in playing
the music “precisely as written: pressing the appropriate keys, blowing at the
level that is indicated . . . just playing it [the written score] precisely.” The score
provides players with a technical prescription for its precise conversion into
musical sounds. Band members describe the technical prescription or score a s
analogous to a recipe; as a recipe provides instruction for the precise
construction of a particular dish, so too does the technical music provide
instruction for the precise construction of audible musical renderings. The
written recipe for the audible musical “food” consists of both the musical notes
and the qualities impacting each note and collection of notes. Making the
technical music involves giving a technically correct rendition of any given
musical score. Technical correctness is judged by the conductor, who is also
able to modify and/or interpret the musical score in any way he sees fit. When
he does so, his interpretations and modifications are understood by players to
constitute part of the technical score that they must reproduce in the final
rehearsal instance. If the written music is a recipe, then the conductor is the
“head chef’ who directs his “kitchen staff’ in the precise construction of the
musical “dish.”
The production of the technically correct music is the focus of all
rehearsal periods, which consist of a set sequence of events. The conductor first
asks band members to “just play through” the score newly presented to them.
The conductor listens carefolly to the playing and, upon recognising the
deviance of a played note from its technical prescription in the score, he calls a
halt to playing, and the nature of the deviation is communicated to band
members. Identification of a mistake is made by the conductor in two ways. As
he described it to me, the conductor simultaneously listens to the audible
reproductions made by the players and visually tracks the technical prescription
made for notes in the score. The conductor both sees and hears mistakes as they
occur as he audibly and visually surveys the notes.
Technical problems with played versions of the score are then corrected
in very particular ways. When a problem is identified (which occurs extremely
frequently during initial and subsequent playings of pieces newly presented to
players), the conductor stops the playing, refers to the score, communicates to
players the mistake compared to the score and to what he “should have heard,”
and then seeks to correct the faulty playing by drawing the faulting player’s
attention to the relationship between his or her body and the instrument. More
specifically, he draws attention to the point of intersection between a player’s
body and the surface of the instrument. The conductor asks musicians to direct
their attentions in the following kinds of ways: