Music and Gesture
John S. Rink · The British Journal of Aesthetics · 2007
THIS volume starts by waving a flag and then throwing down a gauntlet. ‘The study of music and gesture—of music as gesture, of Musical Gesture—has come of age’, the editors tell us: ‘the future is gestural’ (p. xix). It is a risky move: not only do Gritten and King immediately pull the tail of the sceptical reader (a category I do not belong to), but they also raise expectations of coherence and consensus within the volume and across the work of those advancing the cause. In fact, as they later acknowledge, such qualities remain elusive, partly because no single understanding of ‘musical gesture’ could encompass all of the meanings adumbrated in the twelve contributions. That may be inevitable, given the potentially disparate perspectives of composers, performers and listeners among others. Nevertheless, I wonder whether some authors have a clear sense of the term or, to put it differently, whether they are focusing on what the book purports to be about.