When Gesture Sounds: Bodily Significance in Musical Performance

International Symposium on Performance Science
ISBN 978-90-9022484-8
The Author 2007, Published by the AEC

All rights reserved
When gesture sounds:

Bodily significance in musical performance
Elena Esteban Muoz1,2
1
Department of Musical and Physical Expression,
College of Education, Complutense University of Madrid, Spain

2
Royal Conservatoire of Madrid, Espaa
When gesture sounds is a specific reflection about the awareness of

expressive movement as a meaningful and complementary element of
sound in live musical performance. Given that movement is the motor of
sound and intention the impulse of gesture, the inevitable connection
between intentional bodily movements and music emerges, allowing us
to establish synaesthesia channels which influence expressiveness,
understanding, and communication in performance events. This study
expounds an approximation to the cognitive aspects of gesture and its
significance in relation to musical practice and perception, considering
players and audience. The idea that gesture could act as a visual stimulus
to perform and perceive music in a particular way is defended. Times of
gesture are evaluated, with their implicit intentions and meanings.
Finally, an incursion into pedagogy intends to examine what of gesture
could be taught and, if so, how.
Keywords: gesture; live performance; expressiveness; pedagogy; synaesthesia
Self-awareness in performance is one of the goals that musicians set

themselves to enhance good practice and to achieve a personal and effective
version of repertoire (Green and Gallway 1986). This theoretical research
tries to show that expressive movements do not occur by chance, even when
they appear to be a spontaneous and natural consequence of an irresistible
corporal experience while playing a musical instrument. Mind, guided by will,
addresses the expressive movements attempting to connect body and music.
The body metaphor of sound (Davidson 2002, Snyder 2000) is in this sense
the result of an intelligent feeling. Because knowing develops in mind and
mind develops in the brain, some authors argue that all human knowledge
56
WWW.PERFORMANCESCIENCE.ORG
draws its sustenance from corporeal roots (Bowman 2004). Avoiding

hierarchies, what this argument affirms is indisputably the relationship
between body and mind in a dependant unit. Production, perception,
cognition, and teaching are the explorative domains of expressive gesture.
MAIN CONTRIBUTION
This research focuses attention on channels of significance (not in a semantic
level but in an association one) that emerge when players and audience
connect gesture with some specific musical parameters, such as character,
articulation, quality, and intensity of sound. Players build this connection into
a holistic musical performance through a mental process that guides their
understanding of musical discourse and their non-verbal expression, while
the audience constructs it in a global perception via imagination. The result of
this significance may be explained in multiple terms including sensitivity,
culture, and musical understanding. A further question, for later research,
emerges at this point: does the relationship between music and gesture
necessarily coincide for both performer and listener? Apart from sharing the
sensitivity, culture, and musical understanding referred to above, any attempt
at an answer would have to bear in mind the performers intention
(Hermern 1993) and the empathy between performer and audience.
Perceptive dimensions in live performance
In all live performances, two sensorial dimensions existthe aural and the
visualin which musicians and audience are involved together, performing
and perceiving respectively. Obviously, sound is the greatest result of
performance but, as we know, sound is essentially movement. Nothing
sounds if nothing is in movement (Fernndez 2000). The motor of sound,
which makes instruments vibrate, is the performers movement, or in other
words when a proper combination of skeleton, muscles, nerves, and
circulation (Ortmann 1962) occurs. The implementation of a sort of body
choreography, which includes one kind of intentional movement, the gesture,
is what some researchers have appointed as body language (Davidson 2002,
Dhal and Friberg 2007).
Gesture does not really sound, but it represents the factual objectivity of
the sound related to its visual perception. To the question what is, then, what
performers do?, Eric Clarke (2002) responds: in one stagethey produce
physical realizations of musical ideas. And Wayne Bowman (2004, p. 38),
writing about cognition and the body, assures that perception of musical
gesture is invariably a fundamental part of what the music, fully perceived,
INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON PERFORMANCE SCIENCE
57
is. We have now, not only a gesture, but a musical gesture (Chaffin et al.
2007). Two kinds of gesture exist in performance: technical and expressive.
The first is necessary to produce sound, overcoming mechanical challenges.
The second one is not essential to produce sound but complementary to the
combinations of sound qualities in order to feel or communicate expression.
When both co-exist, and are perceived as one, the experience of performance
becomes free and, paradoxically, the fusion between player and instrument
reveals the symptoms, not their realities, of musics existence; those that
Claude Debussy found among notes.
To see is to perceive. Seeing performers gestures as they play strongly
influences the particular kind of data registration that accompanies the
listening in the total perception of the performance.
Connections between performer, art of performance, and gesture
By taking into account the performers gesture, we are assuming and
respecting their identity as music makers (Elliot 1995) and not only as
music transmitters. The role of a performer is not exclusively an executive
demand of music to sound, although some exceptional musicians thought
this. Ravel and Stravinsky asked performers to translate (execute) the score
into sound, which implied a resolute attempt to make their own personalities
invisible. This is not the commonly accepted theory of performance however
(Urmsom 1993). Nowadays, performing is an art (Kivy 1995, Mark 1981), and
more ambitiously we say that music is a performing art (Elliot 1995, p. 165).
The clearest example that supports the assertion that gesture represents
sound is the conductors work. When conductors move, they produce gestures
making a physical and a mental effort to express music with their bodies. In
the solitude of a conductors personal practice, when music still does not
sound through an orchestra, is when the paradigm of gesture sonority
appears.
Artists ceased long ago to be the intermediate hand between the muses
and the real world and now we have no doubts that when someone is involved
in an artistic process, the result depends on his or her personality. One of the
singularities of an artistic presentation is its uniqueness. Gesture can be
learned, even imitated, but it will never be the same in different individuals
because it is part of ones personality. It is important to clarify that gesture
does not refer to simple gesticulation, mimicking, or theatricality with
independence of sound, although it could be analyzed as a nonsonic aspect
of musical performance (Kivy 1995). The pathway has been that sound is
motion, intentional motion is gesture, and expressive gesture represents the
58
metaphor of musical expressiveness in performance. Expressiveness is an

aesthetic characteristic of music and, in terms of aesthetic appreciation of
gesture, we could observe the elegance, power, sophistication, or discretion of
its expression as a beauty sign that only a performers personality may show.
Times of gesture: implicit intentions
When discussing times of gesture in relation to sound, we can distinguish
three moments: time before, parallel time, and time after. While in the time
before, the gesture represents the anticipation of musical technical need or
expression, in the parallel time this gesture accompanies and is seen
contemporarily to the sonorous discourse. When sound is free of any real
practical execution, expressive gesture may explain or resolve the expression
of sound in the time after. Tracing a simile, expressive gesture in the parallel
time could be comparable to the modal complement of a sentence and in the
time before and after the verb. Expressive and technical gestures exist in time
before and in parallel time, but in time after the truly valid and reasonable
possibility is to produce and perceive expressive gestures.
Time before is clearly perceived when a performer is about to play, and
manifested in take impulse breathing, preparing his or her fingers, arms, or
body position, looking around, coming into contact with the instrument,
initiating a movement in air, etc. The information contained in this kind of
gestures is completely intentional and it warns us about what is going to
happen with the coming sound. Parallel time is that in which gesture
develops itself in the real dimension of musical performance art: the present
time. Music, as is any kind of sound, is fleeting, compared to material things.
In musical performance, neither the past nor the future exists. Even ideas
have past and future: both the past and the future of three plus two are five.
The past of the ensuing performance rests on the one hand on the idea of the
composer and on the other hand on the score, being its future and its own
past. In this context of inevitable present-ness of sound, the parallel gesture
is shown. Finally, in the time after, gesture becomes significant again, evoking
the past present of performance.
Gesture in pedagogy
We can deduce from everything said above that to perceive, feel, or
understand music, it is crucial to perceive, feel, and understand our body,
referring back to awareness. The educational amalgam between body and
music, human being and art, physical and aesthetic, has been defined by
Richard Shusterman (2004) as somaesthetic. Of course, we are born with
INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON PERFORMANCE SCIENCE
59
certain instinct of abstraction, which can mean that what we perceive, feel, or
understand instrumental practice or musical listening, which could be
conceptualized as well as described. However, we are immersed in multiple
contexts (Elliot, 1995) and it is not easy to take part of a non natural context
as music is, in which abstraction requires a complex effort of perception and
cognition. Essential parameters of music, sound, and rhythm are part of the
nature of our body expression, but the way to combine them into systems is
the result of many cultural constructs. We are not born knowing a culture, so
music, as a cultural construction, should have a training stage in which the
understanding of its cultural meaning is elaborated. The elaboration around
the comprehension of gesture as an image of music needs again not a
natural but a cultural intervention: method.
Method in musics pedagogy includes the hows of practicing. The basic
strategies to teach students how to feel, enjoy, produce, and convince with
expressive gestures are usually to initiate them in imitation of gestures in
order to develop their own inspiration in their future movements. Some of
these strategies include discussing with students their video tape recordings
or mirror visualizations, guiding with physical contact the students body
segments in their movements, adding verbal metaphoric information to the
gestures shown, offering students the opportunity to teach what they know
and interpret about gesture by giving classes to other students, and urging
students to use their bodily expression, freely and consciously, connecting it
with a new vital dimension in any physical action: not aural, not visual, but
spatial.
IMPLICATIONS
Expressive gestures do not supplant the contents of music, in spite of the
musical concerts of gestures that Milton Estomba, the character of Mario
Benedettis Cuento, La expression (Story, The expression) gave every
Saturday. Music is sound, first and over all, but a live concert experience.
Gestures are part of a range of human reactions to feeling, sensation and
comprehension, and to underestimate them in live performance would mean
to ignore human signals in a human invention, which is what music is.
Address for correspondence
Elena Esteban Muoz, Department of Musical and Physical Expression, College of
Education, Complutense University of Madrid. C/ Velayos, 16 Bajo C., Madrid 28035,
Spain; Email: elenaesteban@edu.ucm.es
60
References
Bowman W. (2004). Cognition and the body: Perspectives from music education. In L.
Bresler (ed.), Knowing Bodies, Moving Minds (pp. 29-50). Dordrecht, The
Netherlands: Kluwer Academic Publisher.
Chaffin R., Lemieux A., and Chen C. (2007). It is different each time I play: Variability
in highly prepared musical performance. Music Perception, 24, pp. 455-472.
Clarke E. (2002). Understanding the psychology of performance. In J. Rink (ed.),
Musical Performance: A Guide to Understanding (pp. 81-94). Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Dahl S. and Friberg A. (2007). Visual perception of expressiveness in musicians body
movements. Music Perception, 24, pp. 443453.
Davidson J. (2002). The language of the body during performance. In J. Rink (ed.),
Musical Performance: A Guide to Understanding (pp. 173-182). Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Elliot D. J. (1995). Music Matters. A New Philosophy of Music Education. Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Fernndez M. (2000). Acstica para todos, incluidos los msicos! Vitoria-Gasteiz,
Spain: Producciones Agruparte.
Green B. and Gallway T. (1986). The Inner Game of Music. London: Pan Books.
Hermern G. (1993). The full voicd quire: Types of interpretation of music. In M.
Krausz (ed.), The Interpretation of Music: Philosophical Essays (pp. 9-32). Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Kivy P. (1995). Authenticities: Philosophical Reflections on Musical Performance.
Ithaca, New York, USA: Cornell University Press.
Mark T. C. (1981). The philosophy of piano playing. Philosophy and Phenomenological
Research, 41, pp. 299- 324.
Ortmann O. (1962). The Physiological Mechanics of Piano Technique. New York: E.P.
Dutton.
Shusterman R. (2004). Somaesthetic and education: Exploring the terrain. In L. Bresler
(ed.), Knowing Bodies, Moving Minds (pp. 29-50). The Netherlands: Kluwer
Academic Publisher.
Snyder B. (2000). Music and Memory. Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA: MIT Press.
Ursom J. O. (1993). The ethics of musical performance. In M. Krausz (ed.), The
Interpretation of Music: Philosophical Essays (pp. 157-164) Oxford: Oxford
University Press.

When Gesture Sounds: Bodily Significance in Musical Performance

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

When Gesture Sounds: Bodily Significance in Musical Performance

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

When Gesture Sounds: Bodily Significance in Musical Performance

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

International Symposium on Performance Science

The Author 2007, Published by the AEC

When gesture sounds:

Department of Musical and Physical Expression,

College of Education, Complutense University of Madrid, Spain

Royal Conservatoire of Madrid, Espaa

When gesture sounds is a specific reflection about the awareness of

Self-awareness in performance is one of the goals that musicians set

draws its sustenance from corporeal roots (Bowman 2004). Avoiding

INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON PERFORMANCE SCIENCE

metaphor of musical expressiveness in performance. Expressiveness is an

INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON PERFORMANCE SCIENCE

You might also like