Gesture

In everyday lexicon, gestures are defined as meaningful muscular movements. They are simultaneously idiosyncratic and individual and culturally conditioned. Gestures are deeply meaningful without employing the formal syntax of language. Scholars use the term gesture in musical analyses in a number of unique ways, but all seem to agree that musical gestures are very much like physical gestures and that physical gestures have auditory correlates.

Most define gesture as an expressive movement that becomes marked as significant by an agent. Musical gestures are not to be conflated with motives or themes but may be made up of characteristic musical elements such as pitch, rhythmic patterns, voice leading, timbre, and intensity. A study of gesture is essentially semiotic, and gesture is fundamentally a way to connect musical concepts to embodied experience.

Many gesture theorists anchor their work in developmental psychology. The basis of language and culture is in the interaction between infant and caregiver. Developmental psychologists [Page 514]believe that infants do not make a distinction between different modalities of expression. The tone of voice, facial expression, movement, and touch of the caregiver are all perceived as a unified gestalt by the infant. Some theorists believe that artistic expression originates in this preverbal consciousness, at least in some part dependent on the cross-modal exchange between forms of expression. Brain scans have shown that somatosensory centers in the brain are active when one is listening to or thinking about music, and this evidence supports the theory that somatic, auditive, and visual gestures are cognitively connected.

Perceiving music as gesture, therefore, is a cognitive process that has been highly conditioned by environment and is facilitated by the way the mind makes sense of information. When processing large amounts of information, the brain segments the stream of information into manageable “chunks” and recognizes patterns. Even though what one may actually be hearing is an uninterrupted stream of sound, the mind creates segments of information that may be perceived as gestures. These emergent gestalts carry affective motion. One's responses to these gestures may be complex and multilayered combinations of imagined visual imagery, a physical feeling of movement, and an emotional reaction. One cognitively combines gestures into larger structures in order to understand form and/or narrative. Gesture is connected to the concept of markedness. Not every movement or sound made by a performer is intended as a gesture, nor does the listener perceive every intentional gesture as meaningful.

Recent research suggests that the ability to produce or even to hear rhythmic and melodic patterns is limited, and these limitations seem to mirror how one can move. The limits for rhythmic perception are parallel to human phsyical limits. Rhythmic gestures largely conform to neurological limits for the perception and production of patterned movement based on kinesthetic patterns. It may be that certain rhythmic patterns are not perceived as “musical” if they do not relate in some way to one's own physical capabilities. This theory explains the prevalence of common time (mirroring one's own bilaterally symmetrical physiognomy) and the musical patterns associated with “walking,” “galloping,” “waltzing,” and the like. It also explains the common discomfort or difficulty with mixed and changing meter, and aperiodic rhythmic patterns.

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