Music and Gesture

This article follows on the heels of one by Holly Watkins, who argues that music, “a subsystem of the social system of communication,” can evoke the organic (the bodily and the psychic) not by forming a self-contained unity of parts and whole but through the “internal recursiveness” of musical works, their external “recursiveness vis-à-vis other music,” and – crucially – “the knowingness that music displays toward its own operations.” I adopt the premise that music evokes the organic most vividly not through recursive processes in individual systems but through the as-if intentional integration of such processes in multiple systems, of which I concern myself particularly with the harmonic, contrapuntal, and formal domains (or, more precisely, the motivic). I offer correctives to the organicist theories of Arnold Schoenberg and Heinrich Schenker, which similarly concern these domains, and especially to their reception. And I explore this direction through an analysis of Bach’s Prelude No. 7 in E-flat major from book 1 of The Well-Tempered Clavier, BWV 852, a singular piece that billows forth like an unfathomable blossom.

We present the prototype of a hybrid instrument, which uses two contact microphones to sonify the gestures of a player on a generic surface, while a gesture localization algorithm controls the pitch of the sonified output depending on the position of the gestures. To achieve the gesture localization we use a novel approach combining attack parametrization and template matching across the two microphone channels. With this method we can correctly localize 80 ± 9 % of the percussive gestures. The user can assign determined pitches to specific positions and change the pitch palette in real time. The tactile feedback characteristic of every surface opens a set of new playing strategies and possibilities specific to any chosen object. The advantages of such a system are the affordable production, flexibility of concert location, object-specific musical instruments, portability, and easy setup.

This paper describes an approach for a system which analyses an orchestra conductor in real-time, with the purpose of using the extracted information of time pace and expression for an automatic play of a computer-controlled instrument (synthesizer). The system in its final stage will use non-intrusive computer vision methods to track the hands of the conductor. The main challenge is to interpret the motion of the hand/baton/mouse as beats for the timeline.

THE GOAL OF THE PRESENT STUDY IS TO GAIN BETTER
insight into how dancers establish, through dancing, a spatiotemporal reference frame in synchrony with musi- cal cues. With the aim of achieving this, repetitive dance patterns of samba and Charleston were recorded using a three-dimensional motion capture system. Geometric patterns then were extracted from each joint of the dancer’s body. The method uses a body-centered refer- ence frame and decomposes the movement into non- orthogonal periodicities that match periods of the musical meter. Musical cues (such as meter and loud- ness) as well as action-based cues (such as velocity) can be projected onto the patterns, thus providing spa- tiotemporal reference frames, or ‘basic gestures,’ for action-perception couplings. Conceptually speaking, the spatiotemporal reference frames control minimum effort points in action-perception couplings. They reside as memory patterns in the mental and/or motor domains, ready to be dynamically transformed in dance movements. The present study raises a number of hypotheses related to spatial cognition that may serve as guiding principles for future dance/music studies.

This paper contends there are several causes of timbral homogeneity in contemporary electric guitar performance: 1) the acoustic origin of the instrument; 2) the traditional performance practice of timbral constancy, whereby “the player will have been schooled for many years to maintain timbre constancy in many musical situations” (Erickson 1975, p. 12); and 3) the monaural nature of the instrument, in terms of the single-feed audio output found in most electric guitar pickups. The second and third causes are arguably a direct result of the first. Such timbral homogeneity is problematic because it limits the electric guitar performers’ ability to utilise “timbre as a distinct, dynamic feature of music” (Fales 2005, p. 157). Instead, timbre is placed in the traditional role of nuance. As a form of remediation, this paper argues that modern polyphonic pickup technology provides an opportunity for timbral structure to
become a more central part of contemporary electric guitar music by encouraging a practice whereby the performer consciously investigates perceived relationships between common pitch structures and timbral and spatial parametric change in a reflective manner in real-time music performance. The proposed approach maintains the potential to facilitate a new performance practice in contemporary electric guitar music whereby the performer utilises musical stimuli which exploit their similarities to environmental
“regularities” (Bregman 1993, pp. 10-36).

This study investigated how signed performances express musical meaning and emotions. Deaf and Hard Of Hearing (HOH) and hearing participants watched eight translated signed songs and eight signed lyrics with no influence of music. The participants rated these videos on several emotional and movement dimensions. Even though the videos did not have audible sounds, hearing participants perceived the signed songs as more musical than the signed lyrics. Deaf/HOH participants perceived both types of videos as equally musical, suggesting a different conception of what it means for movement to be musical. We also found that participants’ ratings of spatial height, vertical direction, size, tempo, and fluency related to the performer’s intended emotion and participants’ ratings of valence/arousal. For Deaf/HOH participants, accuracy at identifying emotional intentions was predicted by focusing more on facial expressions than arm movements, but the opposite pattern appeared for hearing participants. Together, these findings add to our understanding of how audience members attend to and derive meaning from different characteristics of movement in performative contexts.

This article examines Helmut Lachenmann's groundbreaking work, Pression, for solo cello (1969). Its central question is how to understand Pression: not as a work (self-) contained in a score, but as a live object, as performance, action and embodiment. Pression is one of Lachenmann's first works introducing the concept of musique concrète instrumentale, music that emphasizes the way sound is produced rather than how it should be heard, thus reversing traditional hierarchies. This new musical aesthetic employing performative energy as compositional material requires an analytical approach that corresponds to the nature and demands of the music. My analysis thus draws primarily upon perspectives from the field of performance studies using Erika Fischer-Lichte's concept autopoietic feedback loop to describe the relationship between performer and audience and perceptual multistability to describe that between performance and score. I discuss the prescriptive notation used in Pression, which presents actions and gestures as musical material although their primary purpose is not to produce sound. I address some important ontological implications of the challenge presented by Pression to the notion of the work-concept. In short, I use Pression as a case study for the investigation of notational, embodied, gestural and liminal aspects of performance. Throughout the investigation, I draw on my own experience as a cellist who has performed the piece.

This paper considers the complex and multifarious art of orchestral conducting and in particular the intangible aspects of the conductor’s art, i.e. aspects above and beyond the use of gesture. This article is a survey and evaluation of written accounts of the art of conducting, and an analysis of the elements of which the art is comprised. The article is not intended to analyze how conductor actually conducts, so much as how others – orchestral musicians, conductors themselves, critics and observers – perceive he does.

The core of the conductor’s art is rooted in gesture – manual conducting gestures show fundamental technical information relating to tempo, dynamics and cues, as well as demonstrating musical expression and conveying an interpretation of the musical work. Body posture and language can communicate authority, leadership, confidence and inspiration. Physical gestures such as facial expressions can express a conductor’s mood and demeanor, as well as the emotional content of the music.

In addition to these modes of non-verbal communication, a conductor’s success is dependent on the relationship between himself and the orchestra – his ability to lead, inspire, enthuse, motivate and connect with the musicians he conducts. Charm, charisma and the power of personality are all contributing elements – defying scientific evaluation or explanation, this set of skills comprises a universally-acknowledged ‘X-Factor’ which underlines the art of orchestral conducting at the highest level.

The experience of engaging with music through listening, teaching and learning would be impossible without a bodily interface, through which movement and music can be physically produced, experienced and understood.  Physical gestures form a central part of the communication established between the teacher-student dyad in the communication of symbolic and functional musical knowledge.  Factors such as gesture types (forms and meanings) and their specific outcomes in the teaching and learning processes have been consistently overlooked in the instrumental music ped-agogical context.  This thesis prioritises such undervalued topics, focusing its enquiry upon piano teachers’ hand gestures used to communicate with students during the teaching process and incorporates theoretical frameworks from disciplines such as: music-psychology, psycholinguistics, gesture studies, gesture-led educational re-search, imitation and observational motor-learning.
Three investigations were carried out to investigate the role of teachers’ ges-tures in piano teaching and learning.  The first two combined qualitative and quanti-tative approaches – the results of which were used in establishing the first known categorisation of piano teachers’ gestures.  Amongst the most intriguing findings were the relationship between teachers’ didactic intent and the forms of gesture they employed, and ‘gestural scaffolding’ (when teachers adapted particular gestural communicative channels to suit specific student skill levels).  In the third investiga-tion an experimental setting was used to observe and evaluate the role of teaching gestures in one-to-one instrumental tuition.  Here different gestural teaching and learning conditions yielded multiple levels of learning effectiveness, implying a need for empirical understanding and establishment of gestural performance as a concept that can be applied to enhance learning across specific pedagogical contexts.  As well as building a case for future investigations in this research area, this thesis opens a debate within studies of pedagogical practice in instrumental music teaching, whilst contributing more generally to discussions of how the body impacts upon music un-derstanding.

During the premiere of Cage's famous 'silent' piece 4' 33'', the audience was irritated from not hearing anything. Nevertheless, Cage insisted that the piece was not silent but full of accidental sounds that were music. However, were the first listeners truly mistaken? Can an artwork such as this one determine ways of perception or establish a fact? More generally, how can an artwork such as this one mean anything? To develop these questions, I will first define what 4' 33'' is and examine what makes it appealing. After considering whether 4' 33'' is a musical work, or a conceptual (symbolic) work, I will focus on Cage's aesthetic principles and conclude that there is no determinate way of interpreting the meaning of 4' 33'', in that its underlying principles are contradictory. I will suggest that in order to explain the attractiveness of 4' 33'' as an artwork, it is helpful to consider how gestures can bear their meaning.

Abstract
Title: Orchestrating Timbre – Unfolding Processes of Timbre and Memory in Improvisational Piano Performance
Author: Magda Mayas
Language: English with a Swedish summary
Keywords: extended timbre, improvisation, composition, inside piano, prepared piano, listening, timbral memory, spatialization, gesture, choreography, musical perception, embodied musical performance, artistic research.
ISBN: 978-91-7833-722-4 (printed version) ISBN: 978-91-7833-723-1 (digital edition) URL: http://hdl.handle.net/2077/62283
Abstract
Title: Orchestrating Timbre – Unfolding Processes of Timbre and Memory in Improvisational Piano Performance
Author: Magda Mayas
Language: English with a Swedish summary
Keywords: extended timbre, improvisation, composition, inside piano, prepared piano, listening, timbral memory, spatialization, gesture, choreography, musical perception, embodied musical performance, artistic research.
ISBN: 978-91-7833-722-4 (printed version) ISBN: 978-91-7833-723-1 (digital edition) URL: http://hdl.handle.net/2077/62283

This doctoral thesis presents how the orchestration of timbre is investigated from a performer’s perspective as means to “unfold” improvisational processes. It is grounded in my practice as a pianist in the realm of improvised music, in which I often use preparations and objects as extensions of the instrument.
As practice-based research, I explore multiple, combined, artistic, and analytical approaches to timbre, anchored in four of my own works. The process has also involved dialogues and experimental collaborations with other performers, engineers, an instrument builder and a choreographer. It opposes the notion of generalizable, reproducible, and transferrable techniques and instead offers detailed approaches to technique and material, describing object timbre, action timbre, and gesture timbre as active agents in sound-making processes.
Whilst timbre is often understood as a purely sonic perceptual phenomenon, this view does not accord with contemporary site-specific improvisational practice; hence, the need to explore and renew the potentiality of timbre. I introduce and argue for an extended understanding of timbre in relation to material, space, and body that embraces timbre’s complexity and potential to contribute to an ethical engagement with the situated context. I understand material, spatial, and embodied relations to be non-hierarchical, inseparable, and in constant  flux, requiring continuous reconfiguration without being reduced or simplified. From a performer’s perspective, I define “orchestrating” timbre as the attentive re-organization of these active agents and the creation of musical structures on micro and macro levels through the sculpting and transitioning of timbre—spatially, temporally, physically, and mentally—within a variety of compositional frameworks.
This requires recognizing the multiple and complex roles that memory plays in contemporary improvisational practice. I therefore introduce the term timbral memory as a strategic structural, reflective, and performative tool in the creation of performing and listening modes, as integrated parts of timbre orchestration.
Reaching beyond the sonic, my research contributes to the  field of critical improvisation studies. It addresses practitioners and audiences in music and sound art, attempting to also constitute a bridge from artistic research in music—often viewed as a self-contained discipline—into multiple artistic  fields, to inspire discussions, creation and education.

This thesis focuses on the art of orchestral conducting and in particular, the gestural language used by conductors. Aspects such as body posture and movement, eye contact, facial expressions and manual conducting gestures will be considered. These nonverbal forms of expression are the means a conductor uses to communicate with players.
Manual conducting gestures are used to show fundamental technical information relating to tempo, dynamics and cues, as well as demonstrating to a degree, musical expression and conveying an interpretation of the musical work. Body posture can communicate authority, leadership, confidence and inspiration. Furthermore, physical gestures such as facial expressions can express a conductor’s mood and demeanour, as well as the emotional content of the music. Orchestral conducting is thus a complex and multifarious art, at the core of which is gesture. These physical facets of conducting will be examined by way of a case study.
The conductor chosen as the centrepiece of this study is Austrian conductor, Carlos Kleiber (1930-2004). Hailed by many as the greatest conductor of all time1, Kleiber was a perfectionist with unscrupulously high standards who enjoyed a career with some of the world’s finest orchestras and opera companies including the Vienna Philharmonic, La Scala, Covent Garden, the Met and the Chicago Symphony. He enjoyed a special relationship with the Vienna Philharmonic, the longest of any of his associations, and the performance selected for examination is therefore one with this ensemble.
Using a DVD recording of a live performance, Kleiber’s conducting gestures, and their relationship to the musical score will be examined. The performance selected is that of Johann Strauss II’s Overture to Die Fledermaus, performed at the 1989 New Year’s Day Concert with the Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra.

1 Carlos Kleiber Voted Greatest Conductor of all Time, http://www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/bbcworldwide/worldwidestories/pressreleases/2011/03_mar ch/carlos_kleiber.shtml, (accessed December 12, 2011).

This thesis investigates the process termed ‘entrainment’ by which a group of singers can become ‘in time’ or ‘in synchrony’ with each other. Group entrainment is examined through the lenses of a number of disciplines throughout the thesis: ethnography, ethnomusicology, sociology, animal behaviour, complex systems theory, and psychology.
Ch. 1 defines the concepts such as entrainment, chant, ritual, participatory and presentational musics, and the ethnographical method that will be used in this thesis.
Ch. 2 reveals, through an ethnographical survey of the function of group singing in various traditions around the world, that a central purpose of group singing is to form community.
Ch. 3 examines the form of group singing throughout the world, and finds that a general theory of metre, the perceptual basis of entrainment, can be applied to geographically-distinct traditions, but also that some chanting traditions do not need metre for entrainment to be possible.
Ch. 4 contextualises Turner and Durkheim’s community-forming concepts of ‘communitas’ and ‘collective effervescence’ within a particular music anthropology study of the Suyán Indian ‘Mouse Ceremony’ in Amazonia, with reference to the concept of ‘entrainment’.
After the initial ethnographic survey (Chs. 2-4), the rest of the thesis (Chs. 5-8) explores ways of thinking scientifically about the process of group entrainment.
Ch. 5 discusses bottom-up and top-down approaches to understanding group behaviour, with reference to flocking and schooling behaviour in starlings and fish, and chanting and free jazz improvisation in human musical behaviour.
Ch. 6 puts the bottom-up and top-down dialectic in the context of the current entrainment literature, in order to suggest new approaches for investigating entrainment in group contexts.
Ch. 7 reviews the literature surrounding bottom-up aspects of group interaction such as gesture and visual communication, and the top-down influence of group hierarchy, and also inter-group and joint speech forms of entrainment.
The various disciplinary perspectives discussed in previous chapters then provide the basis for an empirical field study in Ch. 8 of group entrainment in Gregorian chant, involving semi-structured interviews with choristers and systematic video analysis of their chanting. The study investigates how these choristers are able to start in synchrony with each other, looking particularly at the role of gesture and metrical perception. I find that no single mode of communication or perception offers an explanation for the precision of onset synchrony on its own, and therefore conclude that group onset synchrony must depend on a combination of many factors.
This thesis moves the study of entrainment further by discussing ways in which we can think about and investigate group, as opposed to dyadic (joint), entrainment. It also shows the importance of combining the insights of both anthropological and scientific approaches when investigating group entrainment.

Starting from the hypothesis that the signals used in conducting are systematic and shared, so as to make up a lexicon, this work finds out and analyses 23 gesture types, and 11 values in their parameters, that within the body signals of choir and orchestra conductors convey intensity indications: piano, forte, crescendo, diminuendo. The gestures selected from a corpus of concerts and rehearsals are analysed through an annotation scheme that describes the body signals soliciting dynamic action, their precise meanings, and the semiotic devices used; for example, enlarging arms progressively, by representing something growing in width, evokes a crescendo: an iconic resemblance with transposition across modalities, where amplitude is transposed from the visual to the auditory domain.

The better quality pdf is downloadible from here: "http://www.leoalmanac.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/07/LEAVol19No3-Mailman.pdf
Through recent artistic practices and technology of interactive systems for music, composition and improvisation have more and more blended and interconnected with each other – a sui generis situation now called comprovisation. The concept of comprovisation applies equally well to the spontaneous generation and manipulation of computer graphics, especially as such graphics are systematically coordinated audio-visually, while being subject to spontaneous manipulation by a performer.
This is explained in terms of the Fluxations and FluxNoisations Human Body Interfaces, interactive dance systems that generate music and graphics spontaneously in response to hand and body movement. They enable spontaneous expressive shaping of coherent complexity and variety. Thus a multi-layered multimodal experience arises. The aesthetic experience of this multimedia spectacle relates to experiences of various prior music and visual art of the 19th, 20th, and 21st centuries, as well as to hypothetical physical realities. Thus a kind of cybernetic phenomenology of art is pursued and enacted through an embodied cybersynthesis of art with simulated alternate reality. Call it a pragmatic speculative realism, an adventurous technoetic ‘what if.’ As compared to more traditional forms of improvisation, the opportunities for risk-taking and aesthetic exploration rise to a new level of uncertainty, as the reactions of the improviser simultaneously draw from and target both visual and aural modalities, such that the intentions toward each fuse together."

Abstract

If we wish to do research into historically informed performance, we should be interested in how that will be done in practice. By positioning ourselves in the dialectical relationship between history and the musical material we gain a whole gamut of artistic possibilities.

In this paper I will explore the musical-rhetorical background of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s composition, Les Sauvages, as a musician-researcher, harpsichordist, and a basso continuo player. The paper deals with the solo harpsichord composition as well as with the version for soloists, vocal ensemble (choeur des sauvages) and orchestra as part of the opéra-ballet Les Indes galantes.

In doing this, I will not attempt to argue what might be the historically correct performance of the music. Rather, I would suggest that research into the musical-rhetorical roots embedded in Les Sauvages and its performing traditions will illuminate the musician’s embodied relationship to the music during its performance.

The musician’s working processes are still not often articulated in the field of music research. The reason why these processes are worth exploring is that they change the way we formulate the research questions as well as the means by which we find answers to those questions. The results of the analysis of such processes are both qualitative and descriptive.

One of the key concepts in my research is the rhetorical actio. The tradition of rhetorical actio concerns the delivering of whatever one endeavours to say, perform, utter, pronounce, or sing. It is about perceiving a performance and about experiencing it in a space as a time-filled living phenomenon. However, rhetorical actio is not only about speech or oratory. When applied to music, the tradition encompasses a range of other bodily actions not necessarily related to the act of speaking.

By referring the corporeal musical phenomena of Les Sauvages to the features of la stile grotesque of the eighteenth-century ballet, I am searching for confluences between the harsh, aerial and sharp-witted counterpoint and the way the exotic peoples were corporeally represented in the eighteenth-century ballet. The element of “otherness” as something alien can be detected in the idiosyncratically “skipping” music.

Thus, by doing research into the music-related movements of Les Sauvages, I am reaching out beyond the metaphor that regards music as a kind of language towards conceiving music as a living phenomenon, which intrinsically implies its corporeality and patterns of organism-environment interaction. The musical-rhetorical as well as the phenomenological terminology will help to articulate some of the invisible, embodied aspects of the experience of a professional musician.

Almost Human is an investigation of interdisciplinary performance through music that looks to the self to try to further understand subjective performance practices in expression, gesture and sonic
output. This text presents experimental methods of examining and creating music through kinaesthetic and electronic-assisted means within instrumental, dance and interactive works. The
extraction of affective, performative and sonic properties from these works aids in unlocking the relationship between the choreographic, physical and conceptual object.

The first part of the text explores and illustrates multimodal approaches to analysing, capturing, measuring and archiving the moving musician and dancer in an assortment of performative settings. It focuses on a series of works for solo cello, as well as interdisciplinary pieces which positions movement and embodied expressivity at the forefront of the discussion.

The second part is dedicated to the aesthetic, conceptual and utilitarian content of a new interactive work for cellist/mover, and a prosthetic digital spine. Here, relationships are combined to showcase the permeability of the body, as well as its expressive content. The conceptual object, The Spine, serves as a generator to help expand musical and artistic possibilities. Its inclusion in the work aids in refocusing my relationship to movement and sound for creation and performance, but also aesthetically, it adds to the growing canon of experimental ventures in conceptualising expressivity.

Beyond the text, the portfolio of Almost Human includes an auditory and visual chronicle of the process between the years 2012-14, which is used to assist the reader in further understanding the performative practice and findings.
 

Having consistently defied the boundaries of normalized gendered behaviour, David Bowie has become synonymous with iconoclastic acts of gender transgression. His celebrity status is marked by a restless drive for recreation , often in the form of ambiguously gendered personae. These personae do not simply originate from a need for constant transformation. Their lifespan is connected with a complex process of performativity in which Bowie plays a pivotal role in re-animating the gestural traits of several other performers. Through an analysis of the videos for Boys Keep Swinging (1979) and The Stars (Are Out Tonight) (2013), this article explores Bowie's role within the cycle of performativity. Complementing this analysis, the author's interviews with New Zealand Bowie-inspired performers provide further insights about their own performativity in relation to identity.

The first half of the 19th Century was a period of change in the operatic world. It manifested itself in the art of composing, the singing and acting technique, the theatre practice, as well as the audience itself and their expectations. It was also a period, where the female singer moved into the centre of attention, gaining that way a remarkable power over the whole theatre practice of that time, and influencing not only the way of composing, but also the acting on stage and the process of whole opera productions. In this research lecture an important role will play the theatre practice of the first half of the 19th Century, as well as the challenges the female singers had to face during that time, which included being their own stage director, costume designer and make-up artist.
Further, in a more detailed way, will be introduced the style of Bel Canto, which was an essential part of the musical education, and the outstanding performing skills of the two most famous singers of that time - Guiditta Pasta and Maria Malibran. In addition to that, Sofia will show the results of her documentation about challenging her own performance by being her own stage director and staging an opera scene in the style of the historical acting.

Music Analysis, 35(3), 280-313

This article presents an analysis of small-scale melodic movement in South Indian rāga performance, employing the concept of coarticulation, defined here as the tendency for the performance of a unit to be influenced by that which precedes or follows it. Coarticulation has been much studied in phonetics, and also explored to some extent in sign language and the kinematics of musical instrument performance. Here, I seek to account for variation in the performance of Karnatak musical units known as svaras (scale degrees of a rāga) and gamakas (ornaments) through the phenomenon of coarticulation, thus providing an analysis of small-scale melodic movement that focuses on the dynamic processes that form the style rather than categorisation of discrete elements.

The material investigated is a video recording of ālāpana (improvisation) in rāga Toḍi performed by the Karnatak violinist T.V. Ramanujacharlu in Tamil Nadu, South India. A section of the recording is transcribed into staff notation and visualised through pitch contour graphs created in Praat sound analysis software. The hand movements required to produce the musical phrases are described from observation of the video alongside figures showing motion-tracked data. Interviews with musicians, participant observation, and the author’s experience as a student of Karnatak violin provide the foundation for interpretation of the material. Results show that coarticulation can be seen between svaras through the oscillatory gamakas with which they are performed. Atomistic and gestural conceptions of South Indian music are discussed, following which suggestions are made for the implications of this research in modeling the Karnatak style, and for potential applications in musical information retrieval.

The published article can be accessed at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/wol1/doi/10.1111/musa.12071/abstract

Existing qualitative approaches within the field of music perception and embodied music cognition provide scientific models for the evaluation of physical gestures and their expressive impact in performance. This article examines the ways in which qualitative research methodologies and outcomes may be used as stimuli for new choreographic research, drawing upon the original performance ‘Woman=Music=Desire’. Beginning with an illustrated account of expressive features of piano performance by music researchers such as François Delalande and Mark Thompson, recent departures in choreographic and related artistic practice that indicate a growing interest in the expressive function of musical corporeity are discussed. Through exploring such work, the intersubjective and kinesthetic relationship occurring between musician and spectator is explored via an examination of gestural empathy. Thus, through re-appropriating instrumental gestures within practice-led research that interrogates the close relationship between corporeity and expressivity, the musician’s body emerges as a dancing body with the creative potential for a new and exciting departure in choreographic practice. A trailer to the performance ‘Woman=Music=Desire’ may be found at http://www.imogene-newland.co.uk/perf_women_md.php.

In calligraphy, a brush stroke is rooted in an inner image, breath and the uninterrupted flow of movement. The same can be said of a bow stroke on a string instrument or a note sounded on a wind instrument. This article documents the encounter between a specific, two-person form of calligraphic performance, movement analysis techniques, and the mapping of brush gestures to sound processes. It shows how, based on data obtained in motion-capture sessions, the link between gesture and sound is established. This enables different models of sound processes, their specific mode of operation, and the understanding of what makes a stroke. Questions and issues arising from this concrete work are collected and a reflective analysis is carried out via a diagrammatic process. A discussion of critical limitations and possible extensions in this configuration concludes the article.

Within  fteenth-century Italian texts on court dancing we encounter the fairly elusive expression «danzare per fantasmata». It has been connected with the powers of the imagination and the techniques of memory, in relation to both the per- formers and their audiences. It seems suggestive of some ghost-like experience. It is introduced in the key source, Domenico da Piacenza, with extraordinary images, suggestive of a moment of absolute stillness, soon followed by a swift  ight. The relevance of this stylistic category on Renaissance dance aesthetics has undergone recent re-evaluation; so would deserve its implications for the time and space per- ceptions of dancers and onlookers alike.

This thesis studies the possibilities of rhetoric as an interpretative device for Contemporary Music. Rhetoric is taken here in its classical scope, but also in an updated way to current thinking, through the contributions from the movement known as New Rhetoric. Contemporary music, in its turn, is represented here by pieces written by composers such as Bernd Alois Zimmermann, Iannis Xenakis and Roberto Victório. In this way, firstly, definitions of what is understood as music, musical discourse and musical meaning will be exposed, establishing a postulate about the metaphysical status of music, especially in its current production. Then it will study the mechanisms that guarantee the possibility of not only affirming the existence of meaning but of knowing it through the adequate knowledge of an affective reality, a Stimmung, epistemologically accessed through empathy and sensation. However, this knowledge is a living knowledge, which demands to be put into practice to effectively exist, resulting in an ethical complex where levels of responsibility interact within the discursive dynamics of music. Finally, two main instances of rhetorical performance will be exposed: formation and gesture. The first concerns the processes by which performance itself constitutes a musical form; this musical form as process then gives rise to a temporal structure in formation rather than an objectified scheme. Musical gesture, in turn, is the embodiment of meaning, bringing life to music through its gesturing and bringing life through it, resulting in a rhetorical performance of Contemporary Music.

The field of interactive music systems (IMSs), beginning in the 1980s, is still relatively young and fast moving. The field of music theory-analysis, during the same period (since 1980), has undergone a major transformation in terms of technological innovations, flexibility, and breadth. The two fields have not really caught up with each other. It will be interesting to see what arises as they do — especially as both fields have become more concerned with the role of the body and embodied cognition. Framed in terms of contrasting epistemological orientations, this essay considers some relevant developments in IMSs, music cognition, and music theory and analysis, leading up to the present.  The most popular approaches to music cognition and to IMS design are rationalist (Ashby 2010), exploiting the ‘correct’ embodiments of music (Godøy 2004, Leman 2007, Paine 2009) based on affordances (Gibson 1977, Kelso 1998). This essay, however, advocates a pragmatist (Ashby 2010) approach inspired by music analysis and exploiting the potential of kinesthetic learning (associative learning). Prompted by a progressive approach to music analysis, theory, perception, and cognition (Dubiel 1999, Mailman 2007), interactive music technology can also be constructive, flexible, and progressive, by exploiting kinesthetic learning from immersion in new and unusual motion-to-sound mappings derived from dynamic formal processes in analysed music. In this way, immersive interactive systems offer an opportunity systematically to learn new associations based on principles theorised in response to analysis. Experience of these systems essentially ‘rewires the brain’, thereby exemplifying what Korsyn (2004) has attributed to Lewin’s (1986, 1987) approach to music perception: the ironist approach, as formulated by Rorty (1989). Thus a pragmatist ironist experimental (PIE) approach is articulated. Rather than committing to any particular ways music is already embodied, this approach acknowledges the flexible nature of embodied musical experience. It forges and uses interactive music technologies continually to redescribe and therefore reform how music is embodied, thereby disembodying to re-embody music, expanding how music is heard, contemplated and experienced.

Studies concerning eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century women musicians abound within recent musicological scholarship, but the focus on singers and keyboard players – whose musical activities are understood to have “affirmed” their femininity – has had
the effect of obscuring players of less typical instruments. Violin-playing, frequently cast as a man’s activity and imbued with indecent associations, was a case in point. Yet despite the connotations of the instrument, a small but significant group of women did play the violin: it is these violinists that this thesis takes as its central focus. Looking first
at the complex reasons behind objections to women’s violin performance, a number of factors that restricted women’s access to the violin – including the influence of the male gaze and limits placed on women’s physical movement – are revealed. Particular conditions nevertheless enabled certain women to play the violin, namely the personal, educational, and economic support available from diverse sources such as family members, patrons, and institutions like convents and the Venetian ospedali.

In addition to placing women violinists in their historical context, this thesis centres on an analysis of a violin concerto by one of the most well-known female violinists of the era, the Italian virtuoso Regina Strinasacchi. The analysis of Strinasacchi’s Violin Concerto in B flat major is strongly performance based and focuses on the issue of gender and physical movement (performance gesture), topics which were of much interest to eighteenth-century commentators who witnessed women violinists performing. As such the analysis engages with concepts from “embodied” musicology. In exploring Strinasacchi’s concerto we see that female violinists could experiment with a variety of gendered roles through violin performance, embodying both masculinity and femininity through their transgressive gestures. By taking a closer look at women’s violin performance and experiences, this thesis aims to show that these violinists were not as peripheral to the workings of the wider musical community as is sometimes implied. Furthermore, it aims to put women violinists more firmly at the centre of their own stories, challenging the tendency to treat female violinists as novel anomalies.

In this article I demonstrate how listeners understand musical processes with their bodies, and how their gestures can be used to build analytical models. Specifically, I draw on the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty to argue that situated, active listeners project their motor intentional gestures inside music, where they reconstitute the very nature of musical space and its objects according to their own unique perspective. Rather than passively reflecting gestures of performers, these listeners use their own bodily states to create the structure and meaning of music. I illustrate how those states can be mobilized for analysis by taking quantifiable features of gestures––acceleration and temporal profiles––as models of musical structure, and using those models as a basis for analytical narratives. I focus on three pieces–– Olga Neuwirth’s Vampyrotheone, Elliott Carter’s ASKO Concerto, and Thomas Adés’s Living Toys––in which motion-capture studies revealed the different roles of listeners’ gestures in organizing musical experience.
http://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.15.21.3/mto.15.21.3.kozak.html

Review by Nadia Chana:
http://ethnomusicologyreview.ucla.edu/content/book-review-musicking-bodies-gesture-and-voice-hindustani-music-matthew-rahaim-0

"Indian vocalists trace intricate shapes with their hands while improvising melody. Although every vocalist has an idiosyncratic gestural style, students inherit ways of shaping melodic space from their teachers, and the motion of the hand and voice are always intimately connected. Though observers of Indian classical music have long commented on these gestures, Musicking Bodies is the first extended study of what singers actually do with their hands and voices. Matthew Rahaim draws on years of vocal training, ethnography, and close analysis to demonstrate the ways in which hand gesture is used alongside vocalization to manifest melody as dynamic, three-dimensional shapes. The gestures that are improvised alongside vocal improvisation embody a special kind of melodic knowledge passed down tacitly through lineages of teachers and students who not only sound similar, but who also engage with music kinesthetically according to similar aesthetic and ethical ideals. Musicking Bodies builds on the insights of phenomenology, Indian and Western music theory, and cultural studies to illuminate not only the performance of gesture, but its implications for the transmission of culture, the conception of melody, and the very nature of the musicking body.

Endorsements:

“Ranging authoritatively through the fecund terrain of Hindusthani music, Matthew Rahaim reunites musical sound with the bodies that produce it, refuting the discourses and practices that have kept them apart, and revealing their powerful complementarity. The book is concise, smart, erudite, imaginative, and generous on every page. Raga and tala emerge enriched, performers and theorists find common purpose, and music becomes something even bigger and more profound.”—Michael Tenzer, author of Gamelan Gong Kebyar: The Art of 20th Century Balinese Music

“This book offers new ways of understanding the knowledge embodied in gesture and voice. Moving beyond the idea that gesture is merely metaphoric or extraneous, Rahaim presents approaches for analyzing and interpreting gesture to reveal how it relates to the performing body.”—Tomie Hahn, author of Sensational Knowledge: Embodying Culture through Japanese Dance"

In partial fulfillment for the requirements for a Master of Fine Arts in Dance at the University of Colorado, Boulder, this project paper is a retrospective feminist analysis of the modern ballerina through a re-interpretation of Romantic ballet.  Specifically in relation to the role of Myrtha from ACT II of Giselle, choreography and gesture in Romantic ballet are linked to the birth of feminism as it specifically relates to women in the French Revolution.

[Résumé du livre] : The Dawn of Music Semiology showcases the work of nine leading musicologists, inspired by the work of Jean-Jacques Nattiez, the founding father of music semiology. Now entering its fifth decade as Nattiez enters his eight, music semiology, or music semiotics, is still a young, vibrant field, and this book reflects its energy and diversity. It appeals to readers wanting to explore the meaning of music in our lives and to understand the ways of appreciating the complexities that lie behind its simple beauty and direct impact on us.

Following a posthumous foreword by Pierre Boulez and an introduction by the editors, nine chapters discuss the latest thinking about general considerations such as music and gesture, the psychology of music, and the role of ethnotheory. The volume offers new research on topics as diverse as modeling folk polyphony, spatialization in the Darmstadt repertoire, Schenker's theory of musical content, compositional modernism from Wagner to Boulez, current music theory terminology, and Maderna's use of folk music in serial composition.

Contributors : Kofi Agawu, Simha Arom, Rossana Dalmonte, Irène Deliège, Jonathan Dunsby, Jonathan Goldman, Nicolas Meeùs, Jean Molino, Arnold Whittall.

The article analyzes a rhetoric gesture that frequently appears in tonal and post tonal repertoires, and starting from an analysis by Patrick McCreless (2006) postulates that the gesture is more limited than what the author proposes in this reference, reducing it to three stages related with the process of expectations. For the analysis, it checks the definitions offered by renowned investigators of gesture in general and rhetoric gesture in particular. The analysis is based in concepts that imply: the participation of the body in the musical audition, the attributes of significances, the metaphoric audition and, finally, the model of expectations proposed recently by David Huron. Finally, it analyses the instances of the gesture that appear in the pianistic and symphonic repertoire from the eighteenth century up to the beginning of the twentieth century.

Resumo: O artigo analisa um gesto retórico que aparece frequentemente no repertório tonal e pós-tonal, a partir de uma análise de Patrick McCreless realizada em 2006 sobre o mesmo assunto. Defende-se a ideia de que o gesto é mais limitado do que o autor propõe nessa referência, reduzindo-o a três fases relacionadas com o processo da expectativa. Para realizar a análise foram revisadas as definições de gesto em geral e de gesto retórico em particular, propostas por renomados pesquisadores. A análise é baseada em conceitos que envolvem: a participação do corpo na audição de música, a atribuição de significado, a audição metafórica, e, finalmente, o modelo de expectativas recentemente proposto por David Huron. Os casos de gesto que aparecem no repertório pianístico e sinfônico, desde o século XVIII até o principio do século XX são investigados. Palavras-chave: gesto retórico; audição "encarnada"; audição metafórica; análise gestual; retórica musical.

Video-based communication is increasingly common online. This article looks at the hand signs that are used in lip-syncing videos on the app musical.ly and argues that they constitute a codified, non-verbal language of pictograms that is equivalent to emoji in text-based communication. Seeing the lip-syncing videos as performances allows us to situate the hand signs as the latest development in a long history of formalized gestures for theatrical performance. By recognizing this emergent gestural language as a performative element of online communication, we can reinterpret emoji and other forms of visual supplement to writing as part of a larger emerging system of communication where visual signs are becoming integrated into verbal language, not only in written language but also in video-based communication.

The history of European singing technique, from the Italian origins of the stile rappresentativo and the early Seicento musical drama to the heights of bel canto, inextricably relates to the classical rhetorical and philosophical theories, later re-interpreted by the humanist and rationalist authors. Manuel García’s Traité complet de l'art du chant inherits this tradition and contributes to it with every single observation or musical example included in this eminently practical work.
KEYWORDS:
Musical Treatises, Acting technique, Vocal technique, Rhetoric, Poetics, Affects, Passions, Manuel Garcia, Aristotelianism, Ciceronianism, Rationalism, René Descartes, Athanasius Kircher, Historical anatomy , Laryngoscope.

Chapter 3, pp 101-124
Rhythm and Critique: Technics, Modalities, Practice
ed. Paola Crespi, Sunil Manghani

Rhythm requires variation of matter – in a perfectly homogeneous experience of a perfectly homogeneous world there can be no rhythm.    Furthermore, rhythm as a feature of experience (rather than an abstract pattern) arises from a body encountering variation in matter – in other words, movement.  Running your finger across the ridges of the sea shell, you feel irregular pressure on your skin that you can interpret as a rhythm — a pattern of irregular variation of sensation correlate with your movement.  Stopping your finger’s movement you would feel no variation.  If the shell were perfectly smooth, you also would feel no variation.  So corporeal movement and irregularities in matter are necessary to rhythmic experience.  Notice that corporeal movement compounds the body as a necessary ingredient in having this experience.  Feeling through the body, via embodied engagement is a deep component of the experience. 
However, variation of matter and corporeal movement, while elemental as ingredients of a sense of rhythm, do not exhaustively capture its essence.  Rhythm as a temporal pattern in experience lies beyond or in between sense perceptions.  One gets to a sense of rhythmic pattern via perception, but rhythm itself is not sense data; to borrow phenomenological vocabulary, it is not perceived but apperceived.

The reader may find it completely obvious that rhythm is not to be found “out there,” to be represented by sense or sensor data, but rather is a feature of lived experience, and thus inextricably part of phenomena rather than data.  But in the age of zombies, it’s useful to refer to much more extensive arguments such as Merleau-Ponty’s scientific meditations on temporal experience.  He writes: “We are not saying that time is for someone, which would once more be a case of arraying it out, and immobilizing it. ...We must understand time as the subject and the subject as time.”  [Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception, 491]
Departing from cognitivist and phenomenological projects, we keep in play various commitments to particular notions of subject, body or time.    This methodological attitude draws from both pragmatism’s radically empirical approach (to borrow from William James) and Husserl’s injunction to attend to the phenomena themselves.  This we start from neither theoretical abstractions like time or numbered metric nor imperceivable mechanism, but rather from lived experience.  This suspension, or keeping in play, of abstractions like subject, body, or time lies at the heart of a pragmatist empiricist method.

This approach to rhythm that we describe also suspends commitment to a particular notion of the anthropic subject, whether phenomenological, psychological or cognitive.  In this sense, it shares with pragmatists and process philosophy and some aspects of contemporary materialism after Deleuze the proposition of experience without a subject.

Music composition is seldom considered a physical activity or embodied experience. As current technologies enable the mapping of movement to musical parameters, the consideration of gesture and movement becomes essential to shaping the identity of a piece. This paper discusses the concept of choreographed sound as part of “kinesonic composition,” an approach that foregrounds embodied experience, integrates physical and imagined gesture, kinetic and kinesthetic experience, and sonic elements. It also describes the Remote electroAcoustic Kinesthetic Sensing (RAKS) system, a wearable wireless sensor interface designed specifically for belly dance movement. Discussing three recent pieces that use the RAKS system, the authors outline the bidirectional relationship between movement and music in a kine- sonic framework.