Musical Gestures: Conceptualising, Communicating and Collaborating in Performance

Abstract

Musical gestures communicate musical concepts between musicians and to audiences. Music is often considered an aural art form, but both aural and visual gestures may contribute to musical communication within ensembles, and between performer and audience. To date, aural and visual gestures have been examined from the audience’s perspective. This study aims to investigate performers’ conceptualisation and creation of musical gestures from the disciplines of mainstream performance (MSP) and historically informed performance (HIP). While aural gestures have been explored between these two disciplines, research has not yet considered them by physical gestures. Six string performers (3 MSP and 3 HIP) participated in an interview about music gestures in performance. The interview explored how musical gesture is conceived by performers, how they use it as a communicative tool, and its importance in collaboration within ensembles. All participants discussed how they approached performance through aural and visual means. Performers unanimously reported their aural gestures instinctively, but were also comfortable with the concept of visual gestures despite having never verbalised this before. For these performers, the visual element of performance was intuitive. This study makes an important contribution to recent work focused on audience reception of music performance by sound and sight. Music performance education must now consider the way performers approach performance from both aural and visual perspectives, so that music performance students are cognisant of the importance of both the sound and sight and equipped to address it in performance.