58
Popular Culture Review
Rehearsal as Recipe, Performance as Banquet
During rehearsals, band members are the kitchen staff to the
conductor’s head chef. The kitchen staff is wholly concerned with the written
words of the musical recipe and is not involved with experiencing the musical
ingredients as musical foods to be tasted and smelled. The precise construction
of the musical dish is a technical exercise in arranging all of the necessary
ingredients in order for cooking later. The musical dish may be viewed (visually
surveilled), heard piece by tiny piece (aurally surveilled), and touched
(haptically surveilled), but it is not eaten or smelled until performance time,
during which band members feast on the musical food. The ingredients of the
musical dish are experienced by band members as component parts; as one
described it to the agreement of the others, it is a recipe for chocolate cake,
consisting, perhaps, of the wheat flour of the timing, the emulsifier of the
dynamics, Ae antioxidants of the tuning, the sugar of the key. The entire
ingredient list never proceeds beyond a list of component parts required for the
whole dish during rehearsal periods. The decadent musical cake may be
consumed by audience members present during rehearsals, but it is not for band
members to eat. Audience members are able to comprehend complete music
during a rehearsal session where a band member cannot. Audience members do
not have to feel themselves extended into saxophone in order to hear sax music,
and may pay as much attention as they like to the points at which the sax man
meets his sax; they may eat musical cake.
Band members, for their part, eat a much more decadent cake. Having
been denied their habitual urge to satisfy their sensual appetites, they gorge
themselves on musical chocolate cake, inhale its rich freshly baked aroma, feel
its creamy textu re invade the insides of their bodies, and hear in the music the
deep sights of sensual hunger being satisfied. Band members never see the
musical cake; they eat it with their eyes closed, in ecstasy, in satisfaction, in
sensual extension. Band members do not taste the musical cake they make for
audiences, because band members are experiencing in the performance the taste
of the senses being released from tightly reigned-in self-surveillance. They
experience sensual extension into the musical tasted, felt, heard, and smelled,
but never seen, chocolate cake.
Serres’s work is again useful here. Serres refers to the Last Supper
(among other banquets) in the ‘‘Tables’' section of Les Cittq Sem^ which deals
with taste and smell. Two bodies, or, rather, two sides of one body, emerge from
the banquet. On the one hand is the body of the Assumption, “the body raised up
in language,” which, as the result of linguistic petrification, is reduced to the
condition of statue, and is no longer able to taste and smell. Says Serres, “when
it is saturated by the word, the body loses its antique graces.”^® On the other
hand, and set against this linguistic body, is the body consumed at the Last
Supper. This body circulates in the forms of bread and wine, and is never fixed
or held still, but is, as Connor notes “a mobile transubstantiation.”^^ In one way.