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 (1840–1928)
“The simplest surrealist gesture consists in going out into the street, gun in hand, and taking pot shots at the crowd!”
—Surrealist slogan from the 1920s, quoted by Luis Buñuel in My Last Sigh, ch. 10 (1983)
“The white man’s mullein soon reigned in Indian corn-fields, and sweet-scented English grasses clothed the new soil. Where, then, could the red man set his foot?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“If I feel strongly, I say it. I know I can do more good by being vocal than by staying quiet. I’d have a whole lot more money if I lied, but I wouldn’t enjoy spending it.”
—Martina Navratilova (b. 1956)
“Orpheus with his lute made trees
And the mountain tops that freeze
Bow themselves when he did sing.
To his music plants and flowers
Ever sprung, as sun and showers
There had made a lasting spring.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)