Musical Gesture
In music, gesture is any movement, either physical (bodily) or mental (imaginary). As such "gesture" includes both categories of movements required to produce sound and categories of perceptual moves associated with those gestures. The concept of musical gestures has received much attention in various musicological disciplines (e.g. music analysis, music therapy, music psychology, NIME) in recent years.
For example, the "musical" movement from a close-position tonic C major chord to a close-position dominant G major chord requires on the piano the physical movement from each white key of the first chord to the right (in space, upwards in pitch) five white keys or steps. Thus gesture includes both characteristic physical movements by performers and characteristic melodies, phrases, chord progressions, and arpeggiations produced by (or producing) those movements.
Read more about Musical Gesture: Introduction, Music-related Body Movement, Gesture in Indian Vocal Music, Hatten's Musical Gestures
Famous quotes containing the words musical and/or gesture:
“Then, bringing me the joy we feel when wee see a work by our favorite painter which differs from any other that we know, or if we are led before a painting of which we have until then only seen a pencil sketch, if a musical piece heard only on the piano appears before us clothed in the colors of the orchestra, my grandfather called me the [hawthorn] hedge at Tansonville, saying, “You who are so fond of hawthorns, look at this pink thorn, isn’t it lovely?””
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“the plump of my belly, the
hollow of your
groin, as a constellation,
how it leans from earth to
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play....”
—Denise Levertov (b. 1923)