Where do you look when you play? Seriously, I’ve always wanted to ask other saxophone players this question.
Since I have spent the better part of a musical career playing in bands where I don’t use sheet music, it’s not like I have music to read. If I’m not playing, I tend to mostly look out into the audience and engage with them in some way. I intersperse that with interacting with my bandmates.
If I am playing however, I do one of 2 things: If I am soloing, I more often than not play with my eyes closed. If I’m not soloing, my eyes are open, and I tend to look at my horn.
After hundreds of hours of staring at my saxophones, I am intimately familiar with certain parts of my horns. The parts I mostly stare at are the octave key, octave mechanism, and the neck.
I have tried to capture this view in photos, but to no avail. I’ve even had my partner stand behind me and try to photograph what I see, but that didn’t work either.
Then this morning I saw this photo posted on Flickr from Allfred. He managed to do a pretty good job of capturing the view a bari player has of their horn.
Play the music, not the instrument.~Author Unknown
Photography by: allfr3d Source: Flickr
Depending on the bari player’s height, and angle he/she holds their horn at, this could easily be the view they have of upper bow, pig tail, neck, and octave key. BTW, I don’t know what brand of sax this is, but I can tell you it isn’t one I own. 😉
I think it’s difficult to come up with interesting ways to photograph a saxophone, or with interesting bits of a saxophone to shoot. However, Allfred has managed to capture a great photo here precisely because it is from such an interesting perspective.
Hi Helen,
Perhaps this comes under the rubric of TMI (too-much-information), but when I am “in the zone,” my brain switches into auditory mode, and the visual input is processed as everything at once and nothing in particular. In other words, my eyes sort of glaze over, which can be very unsettling for fellow musicians who are not accustomed to my mo and don’t understand that I am still processing visual information, but not reacting to it overtly other than musically. It involves a sort of processing re-routing where what I hear defines my spacial imagination instead of what I see.
This is more like an “over the shoulder” view than what I, as a sax player, actually “see.” That’s not wrong, just different.
Peace,
paul