Music and Gesture (review)

The publication of a collection of essays entitled Music and Gesture in 2006 attests that the study of gesture in music scholarship has come of age. Since the field is in its nascent stage, the editors Anthony Gritten and Elaine King hope to achieve two general objectives: 1) to explore the relations between music and gesture from a variety of theoretical angles; and 2) to examine performers' gesture.

Robert Hatten argues in his opening essay that gesture should be broadly defined as "energetic shaping" through time. Any "energetic shaping" may be intended or interpreted as a gesture. As musical gestures emerge from the otherwise disparate musical elements including texture, articulation, dynamics, pitch, and duration, any listener—Hatten believes—will understand "gestural" meanings intuitively. But if so, how can a composer get their "gestural" meanings across? The "energetic shaping" that Hatten describes therefore points to the issue of notation. In the second essay, David Lidov rightly points out that notation cannot fully represent gesture, for "much music teases with meanings to which it is not systematically and explicitly committed" (p. 41). Even though we can identify the "energetic shapings," Lidov rightly argues that we cannot analyze musical gestures as if they carry definite meaning.

Discussion of music and gesture necessarily points to the issue of embodiment. Arnie Cox argues that abstract musical concepts are metaphors of embodied experience. "Imitative participation" (p. 46) is a part of musical comprehension. "Subvocal imitation" helps us understand singing. "Subvocalization of instrumental melodies" —the feeling or the urge of singing along (p. 49)—indicates that we understand instrumental music in terms of vocal experience. Cox's observations bolster Hatten's claim by connecting physical gesture to musical gesture. Since we grasp meanings of gesture and music viscerally, we need to establish "gesture" as an analytical category independent of "figure" or "motive." Continuing the line of inquiry of metaphor, Steve Larson argues that "musical forces" are analogous to physical forces. But the problem is that he leaves the thorny question of "gesture" unanswered. If we hear the entire first phrase of the song "Happy birthday to you" as one gesture (p. 61), then what is the difference between a gesture and a phrase? Perhaps a more basic question comes to the surface and yet again: What is a gesture? Perhaps more instructively, Larson notices that within the first phrase of "Happy Birthday to you" there exists another gesture: the A-G melodic descent of the opening G-G-A-G melody (p. 62). If many types of gestures coexist, then does the concept of gesture mean anything specific? In other words, does the term "gesture" help or hinder our understanding of music?

William Echard's essay discusses not so much gesture as movement. By interpreting the musical setting in light of the lyrics about a moving worm, Echard asks an interesting question: What is "moving" when a musical movement takes place? The answer to this question in turn has a lot to do with gesture, for gesture is—first and foremost—physical movement. His "Funky worm" example shows that melody "moves." By exploring music movement from the perspective of immanence, Echard negotiates a position that transcends the boundary separating the extra-musical and the purely musical.

Raymond Monelle explores the relationship between musical topic and allusion, issues closely related to studies of rhythmic gesture. He claims that "the military topic ... comes from a much more distant time from the heroic epics of antiquity" (p. 95). The problem with this kind of "analysis"is revealed in a lack of historical and cultural specificity. That "the signification of musical topics is primarily cultural, not social/contemporary" (p. 94) is overly simplistic, for it assumes that the concepts of "culture" and "contemporary" are mutually exclusive and denies that the concept of "contemporary" is necessarily historically and culturally constituted. This drawback reveals the limitations of exploring meanings of "quotations," "topics," and "allusion" in a purely theoretical space.

Anthony Gritten examines the scholarly attitude...