New Perspectives in Music and Gesture
Marc R. Thompson, Juan Ignacio Mendoza · 2014
New Perspectives in Music and Gesture, Edited by Anthony Gritten and Elaine King. Farnham, United Kingdom, and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., 2011, 326 pp. ISBN: 978-0-7546-6462-8. £63.00.New Perspectives on Music and Gesture (2011), edited by Anthony Gritten and Elaine King, is an engaging follow-up to the book Music and Gesture (Gritten & King, 2006). Most (but not all) of this volume's 13 contributing chapters are based on lectures given at the Second International Conference on Music and Gesture, held at the Royal Northern College of Music, Manchester, United Kingdom, in July 2006. Like its predecessor, this book features contributions from ethnomusicology, music performance, music theory, music education, music philosophy, music semiotics, and music cognition. There are, however, some new fields represented here-perhaps most notably in a chapter on the psychobiology of gestures. The contributors could all be labeled musicologists, but this would be a gross simplification given their unique multidisciplinary research specialties. Indeed, it is difficult to define the music theorist who also does statistical modeling, or the music psychologist who performs computational feature extraction from motion capture data. Generally speaking, the book presents a rich blend of the theories and practices related to the multimodal phenomenon of the gesture. The editors, both musicians-cum-researchers, are themselves a fine mix of theory and practice. Gritten is a professional organist who has written on the music of Igor Stravinsky and John Cage, and a researcher in the philosophy and aesthetics of music. King, an accomplished cellist, performs empirical research on ensemble music performance with an interest on communicative gestures and breathing.A casual skim through the book gives the immediate impression of diverse research goals, methodological approaches, and experimental data. Each chapter opens with its own definition for gesture, outlining the term's adaptability. The editors appear conscious of the extensiveness to which this word can be used in different streams of research. It is no coincidence that they begin their introduction with an apt and inclusive definition of gesture by music theorist Robert S. Hatten: . . any energetic shaping through time that may be interpreted as significant (Hatten, 2006; p. 1). An energetic shaping is a convenient term, as it can be applied to any mode of perception or production. This multimodal perspective is quite necessary when considering how gestures exist within contexts. As the editors point out, musical gestures may be conceived, produced, experienced and interpreted by individuals in various ways, whether aurally, visually, physically, conceptually or otherwise (p. 1). The book's contributions focus on three main categories of gestures: (a) movement gestures, which are bodily articulations produced by musicians or by listeners; (b) auditory gestures, which exist within the auditory stream as segments of expressive timing or dynamic nuances; and (c) pictographic gestures, which exist within the literal score sheet of a work.The first category can be considered analogous to the physical gestures that commonly accompany linguistic communication (hand movements, head nods, etc.). Such gestures are meaningful because they carry nonredundant information, acting as an additional channel that can either emphasize or completely contradict the spoken word. Moreover, gestures are so integrated with speech communication that we use them even when the person we are talking with cannot see us, for example on the telephone. Taken to a context, the facial contortions or intricate poses acted out by musicians provide visible cues that audiences use to interpret intentions. Like speech, we perform gestures even in the absence of an audience. Take as an example Glenn Gould, who continued to display a unique array of gestures in the recording studio, well after having quit concert life (Delalande, 1995). …