50
Popular Culture Review
The conductor specifically asked William to notice if his
tonguing was correct, because the sounds the conductor heard
emitting from William’s instrument indicated that the tongue
was flicking too hard against the mouthpiece, causing the
passage to sound ‘"too harsh” at the edge of the notes. The
conductor and William then engaged in an extended
discussion over the course of several minutes in which
William described in exhaustive detail the position and
pressure of his tongue against the mouthpiece. TTie conductor
then issued precise instructions about how William was to
change the pressure and position of his tongue as it hit the
instrument surface so that it could produce a technically
correct sound, or the sound set down for the note in the score.^
Both conductor and player engage here in visualising William’s tongue
flicking too hard on the mouthpiece, and William himself, during the next play
through, spent the piece concentrating on the way in which his tongue would hit
against the mouthpiece to produce “softer” sounding notes, in accordance with
the requirement marked down in the score. In his words, William spent the piece
making sure that his tongue touched the mouthpiece in such a way that the
sounds produced would be correct. Here, touch-sense is tightly surveilled and
kept well within William’s self-conscious attention as he plays.
Respiration is also routinely marked out by the conductor as a focus for
a player’s self-conscious attention: “That note is being carried every single time,
you’re blowing it too long . . . concentrate on stopping your breath at the
mouthpiece . . . don’t let it go through.”^Here, players are required by the
conductor to focus on the point that the bodily function of respiration meets
instrument to breathe musical life into it. The focus of attention is not, however,
focused on the noisy musical life of the instrument, or at least it is not ostensibly
here focused, because players are concentrating on the point at which the breadi
and the mouthpiece come into contact.
This skin-to-skin, or breath-on-skin, relationship between player and
instrument is the focus of each player’s attention during rehearsal because this is
the point at which players manipulate their instruments to produce technically
correct musical sounds. Players say that they go into rehearsals intending to
focus on their fingering, tonguing, lipping, and so on. As Erin, a clarinettist,
explained:
The whole [of rehearsal] time you are just trying to get the
piece into your fingers and into your mouth . . . You have to
be very focussed on what you are doing, and you can’t just
take it for granted. That leads to familiarising mistakes. If you
watch it in rehearsal, you don’t play in mistakes that you have