Musical performance and body: About “accompanying” expressive gestures

Abstract

The paper focuses on different concepts about “gesture” that support the musical performance, relating them with the concepts of “movement” and “bodily gesture” (Madeira & Scarduelli, 2014) and “affordances” (Gibson, 1979), to then discuss the gesture typology as a basis for a model of cognitive musical analysis (Ben-Tal, 2012; Zbikowski, 2011, Madeira & Scarduelli, 2015). The paper pretends to discuss the idea that physical gestures that constitute the musical performance contain information on the musical expression (Leman et al., 2012; Davidson, 2012), associating these concepts to explain how the interaction instrument-performer determines the understanding of the musician and the result of the artistic production. The gestural will be approached through the embodied cognition theory (Johnson, 1987) and the instrument through the ecological approach discussed by Windsor and de Bézenac (2012). The review previously mentioned intended to relate concepts in order to clarify the concept of “gesture” in musical performance. The research in question recognizes the gesture as an action of the performer's expressive character while codifying and resulting in cognitive processes. The paper considers that, in today’s research, there is an overrating of the gestural directly involved in the sound production and negligence on the study of the “accompanying” gesture. The paper's central hypothesis is the importance of this accompanying/expressive gesture on the performance, which reveals unique information about the musical discourse.