Gesture in Indian Vocal Music
Further information: Music of IndiaIndian vocalists move their hands while improvising melody. Although every vocalist has an idiosyncratic gestural style, the motion of the hand and voice are connected through various logics, and many students gesturally resemble their teachers. Nikki Moran, at the University of London, has done research on this topic, and it is one of the subjects of Martin Clayton and Laura Leante's Musical Experience Project at the Open University.
Clayton has published a paper on gestural interaction in Indian music performance: "Time, Gesture and Attention in a Khyal Performance." Asian Music, 38 (2), 71–96.
Matt Rahaim, a vocalist and ethnomusicologist, has published an article on the relationship between vocalization and gesture in Indian vocal music: “Gesture and Melody in Indian Vocal Music” Gesture 8(3): 325–347. Rahaim's work approaches gesture and vocalization as parallel expressions of melody, investigates isomorphisms between gesture space and raga space, and studies the inheritance of "paramparic bodies"--melodic/gestural dispositions handed down through teaching lineages.
Read more about this topic: Musical Gesture
Famous quotes containing the words gesture in, gesture, indian, vocal and/or music:
“re-enact at the vestry-glass
Each pulpit gesture in deft dumb-show
That had moved the congregation so.”
—Thomas Hardy (18401928)
“she gives her children neither sense nor money
Who slouch arouond the world with a gesture and a brogue
And a faggot of useless memories.”
—Louis MacNeice (19071963)
“The Indian navigator naturally distinguishes by a name those parts of a stream where he has encountered quick water and forks, and again, the lakes and smooth water where he can rest his weary arms, since those are the most interesting and more arable parts to him.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)
“Prayer is
The world in tune,
A spirit-voice,
And vocal joys,
Whose echo is Heavens bliss.”
—Henry Vaughan (16221695)
“I believe that water is the only drink for a wise man: wine is not so noble a liquor; and think of dashing the hopes of a morning with a cup of warm coffee, or of an evening with a dish of tea! Ah, how low I fall when I am tempted by them! Even music may be intoxicating. Such apparently slight causes destroyed Greece and Rome, and will destroy England and America.”
—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)