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Popular Culture Review
between my body and the entities that surround it . . . [it is] an impoverished
duet between my animal and the fluid, breathing landscape that it inhabits”'®
(my emphasis). Reciprocity here refers to an exchange between bodies and
objects of the world to the point that objects and persons come to constitute one
another. This occurs precisely because the boundaries between persons and
objects are necessarily blurred in order for people to live, habitually, at all. As
Katz, citing Polanyi, notes of this impoverished, routinely ignored, and blurry
relationship between persons and things, “Each of our effective actions requires
that we disattend our body as we act, focussing away from the point at which
our body intersects with the world . . . in writing, for example, if you watch how
your pen creates the form of each letter, you soon lose your train of thought and
stop writing.”"
During rehearsal periods, the points at which the body intersects with
the world are thoroughly noticed. During performances, however, these
intersections proceed well below the self-conscious attentions of the players or,
in other words, the players inhabit habitual bodies as they play. Band members
have what they call “intense” performance experiences. These are experiences
that Erol could only describe as “the most fucking amazing feeling in the
world,” what Greta could only describe as “as good as great sex,” what Hamlin
called “an overwhelming sense of love,” and what Erin described as “being
close to God.” These are very different descriptions of playing than are applied
to rehearsal, and they describe performance music that, to my ears, sounded
precisely the same as rehearsal musical renderings. Erol attempted to explain the
difference to me in this way: “My sax is a living, breathing part of my own
body. It’s inside of me, and the sounds it makes come from the inside of me.
When you listen to me playing, I am the saxophone, it’s my own self I’m
playing.”'^ He added, at my inevitable question, “It’s not like that during
rehearsal. That’s a technical thing, not a love thing.”'^
During performances, band members describe their corporeal
involvement with instruments in terms of inextricable intertwinement, saying
that the instrument “becomes part of me,” or that he or she is “part of the
sound,” or “part of the instrument.” Band members described the ways that,
during performances, instruments came to constitute part of their own bodies,
and that their own bodies came to constitute part of instruments. Players veiy
often talked about the ways in which the edges of their bodies, their fingertips,
palms, tongues, feet, and lips disc^peared from each of their self-conscious
views during performances, and about the ways in which their instruments came
to be invasive of their own viscera. A flute does not begin, in performance, at
the end of a player’s mouth; it begins below and beyond this point, at some
unspecified point in the lungs where the breath that sustains the instrument’s
noisy life was first taken and expelled. As Katz suggests, the point at which
breath becomes part of the person and at which it ceases to be is wholly
indeterminable, since being respiratorally intertwined in the world is both