Becoming a Body Without Organs through Tuba Performance

Becoming a Body Without Organs through Tuba Performance Jon Hansen In tuba performance, or musical performance in general, there is a difference in mindset between the way that one practices an instru ment in the hopes of technical improvement, and how one actually performs in a musical setting. It is my understanding that I perform my best when I am able to completely divorce my conscious mind from thought that regards and judges technique and method. In the chapter of A Thousand Plateaus entitled "How Do You Make Yourself a Body Without Organs?", Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari expound the practice of a "Body without Organs" (BwO); I believe my aforemen tioned ideal mindset for tuba performance to be an example of this. In this essay, I will try to explain this concept and echo Deleuze and Guattari's advice as it applies to the practice of tuba performance, while keeping in mind that if one wishes to perform in a professional 84 Perspectives of New Music setting, one cannot constantly exist in the BwO and must occasionally make compromises. "The BwO is the field of immanence of desire, the plane of consistency specific to desire."1 When one is not self-conscious, and is instead simply existing and desiring, one is attaining a BwO. It is a type of practice that is both essential and dangerous; innate and difficult; unreachable and being-reached. If one is not careful with it, one can die or go insane. In the case of tuba playing, the BwO exists when one is thinking about music and what one wants to do, rather than about oneself, one's mechanics, and what one has done. The BwO is a disposition or perspective in which one sees and feels immanently, and moves naturally without inhibition. It occurs when a person ceases to see her organs as being constituent parts of a hierarchical organism, and instead simply sees the flow of intensities that they emit and receive. This happens in our daily lives as we go about tasks that we are familiar with, such as eating, breathing, and talking. When we decide, however, that we want to do new things, or do familiar things in new ways, it is very common for us to stratify and intellectualize ourselves and our tasks. These types of acts are breaks from the BwO, but they are occasionally necessary for aspiring professional musicians (and even musicians who simply wish to have other people play with them). Deleuze and Guattari state that "the three great strata .... that directly bind us [are] significance, organism, and subjectification."2 Throughout this paper, I will point to places where these strata enter into our consciousness. It is difficult to imagine that one could be a successful tubist while solely approaching and having approached the tuba with the BwO. Without stratification and intellectualization, how could one understand that the tuba is a musical instrument that produces potentially beautiful sound, let alone create music on one, or even develop the desire to play it? Perhaps one could experience all of this experimentally, but the chance of this happening in a BwO as opposed to a stratifying mind are so much lower, and the time that it would take would be so much higher, that it seems uncontroversial to recommend that people leave their BwOs in situations like this. Once these desires have become part of one's BwO, however, it may be possible to work towards becoming a professional tubist without leaving the BwO very often. A person in their BwO experiments constantly in order to realize desire, and as these desires are realized they become more focused and refined, which thus spurs on more desire and experimentation. Having said this, however, I would think that being intelligent and thoughtful about how one can realize Becoming a Body without Organs technical playing goals is more efficient than blind experimentation. Although leaving the BwO can lead to the obfuscation of desires, there can be long-term benefits to doing it in moderation. Helping students increase their practice efficiency and overall technique is perhaps one of the best justifications for the existence of applied music teachers. They can make the...