Gestures in music making: action, information and perception
W. Luke Windsor · White Rose Research Online (University of Leeds, The University of Sheffield, University of York) · 2011
o m w w w .as h g a te .co m w w w .as h g a te .co m w w w .as h g a te .co m w w w .as h g a te .co m w w w .as h g a te .co m w w w .as h g a te .co m w w w .as h g a te .co m w w w .as h g a te .co m w w w .as h g a te .co m w w w .as h g a te .co m w w w .as h g a te .co m Chapter 2 Gestures in Music-making: Action, Information and Perception W. Luke WindsorThis chapter will explore some issues related to the analysis, perception and production of gestures in music-making.Although it will touch on the most obvious modality through which gestures are viewed by audiences, the visual, it will take a more poietic (and perhaps neutral) approach to defining gestures themselves, rather than an esthesic approach (see Nattiez 1990 for an explanation of these distinctions): for the purposes of this chapter, gestures will be considered to be certain movements made by musicians.Such movements may complement or indeed express other kinds of 'gestures' (such as those a music analyst or performer might discover in a score) and may be perceived through a range of modalities and media.The focus here will, therefore, be on the bodily gestures made by musicians, the nature of the traces these gestures leave on the environment, and how these traces might be picked up and interpreted by audiences.Throughout, the theoretical underpinnings of my arguments are drawn from perceptual psychology, in particular the work of the 'ecological' psychologist James Gibson (1966Gibson ( , 1979;; see Heft 2001 for an attempt to integrate Gibson's work into a broader history of realist and pragmatic psychology and philosophy).This ecological approach has recently received interest from a small number of researchers of music who wish in different ways to integrate action and perception (e.g.Clarke 2005Clarke , 2007;;Dibben 2001; Dibben & Windsor 2001;Windsor 1996Windsor , 2000)), although they mainly focus on the perceptual side of this equation, with some attention paid to electroacoustic manipulation. The Problem of Gesture in PerformanceIt has become commonplace to talk of gesture in music: that this volume exists at all is testament to the recent popularity of the term.For the purposes of this discussion a number of questions will be addressed, first in relation to the Western art music tradition of performance, then through an intentionally paradoxical turn to the performative nature of gesture in electroacoustic composition.First, how are musical gestures perceived?Normally, gestures are considered to be visual signals, but in music it has become quite normal to talk about 011 Ch 2 GRITTEN.