Motive, gesture and the analysis of performance
John S. Rink, Neta Spiro, Nicolas Gold · UCL Discovery (University College London) · 2011
‘Musical gestures are musical acts, and our perception and understanding of gestures involves understanding the physicality involved in their production’ (Cox 2006: 45). Arnie Cox’s provocative statement serves as the point of departure for this chapter.1 One of its main premises is that music’s gestural properties are neither captured by nor fully encoded within musical notation, but instead require the agency of performance to achieve their full realization. The performances in question need not be live: recordings too have distinctly gestural properties even if the visual dimension and experiential character of live music-making are lacking. This chapter also reverses a common tendency to assign the status of musical gestures to conventional musical motives.2 In contrast, we regard the gestures created in and through performance as potentially having motivic functions within the performed music. Such ‘motives’ are defined not in terms of pitch, harmony or rhythm, however, but as expressive patterns in timing, dynamics, articulation, timbre and/or other performative parameters that maintain their identity upon literal or varied repetition.3 The essential point has to do with the nature and function of the given patterns. By way of example, the following discussion focuses on select