‘For any external observer, man is a complexus of gestures. We call gestures all the movements which are performed within the human compound. Visible or invisible, macroscopic or microscopic, highly developed or roughly outlined, conscious or subconscious, voluntary or involuntary, these gestures nonetheless show the same essentially motor nature.’ – Marcel Jousse^[1]

Three pieces from my research repertoire, Finalmente il tempo è intero n° 16, The Crutch of Memory, and prePositions, brought openings for thinking about the physicality of a violinist's actions being the musical material of the piece.^[2] Each of these pieces challenges the habitual relationship and expectations of use and the results of gesture and movement in the relationship between the body of the performer, the instrument, and the music. Examining the meaning gesture and movement can have when learning the piece allowed me to better understand their gestural virtuosity and find more holistic interpretations of this specific repertoire. My particular focus of interest became to clarify for myself the distinction from actions as “just” technique for achieving imagined sound and articulate actions as sound-directed movements where gesture is the musical material.^[3] To think of a gesture as the musical material is to think of an action that is linked to playing violin and which might eventually result in sound, but that exists without being conceived through what sound it must produce but can draw from the physical embodiment of the gesture itself.

Gesture and movement have very intricately interlaced meanings. The inquiries into human gesture, as Christine Roquet notes, are often found in studies of how ‘gesture is represented (in paintings, engravings, bas-relief, photographs)’.^[4] However, as Roquet continues, although 'common wisdom traditionally allows for a distinction: movement is global – a movement of the whole body – while gesture is segmental – the gesture of the hand to say goodbye', there is an increasing necessity to better understand the intricate relation between gesture and movement that exists in performing arts.^[5] Miriam A. Novack et al also argue for distinction between gesture and movement, for expanding the discussion beyond gesture as part of ‘actions used to manipulate objects’ whose ‘features of movement […] make it likely to be interpreted as a representation’ and to examine gesture through ‘a more cohesive understanding of action-interpretations’.^[6]

To describe their definition of musical gesture Elaine King and Anthony Gritten depart from the understanding that ‘any energetic shaping through time may be interpreted as significant’,^[7] and acknowledge the variety of meanings gesture can take and represent in music performance, saying that,

• it is the site and vehicle for the crucial flow of energy between domains, and, as such, is the entropic loophole of music-making – that event through which, at which point, and by means of which music happens, and in consequence of which we are afforded and enjoy all those luxurious and multifarious activities that we describe as ‘musical’, whether compositional, performative, perceptual, critical, or all of the above.^[8]

In discourse about gesture and instrumental music performance, two aspects of gesture are articulated: on the one hand, the actions of sound-production and other is the aural and visual perception of the performance.^[9] Luke Windsor writes about categories of actions with their relative importance to sound-production, among which he mentions are those that directly make the sound – gestures ‘that have a physical mapping from action to acoustic consequence’ – and those that supplement the making of sound – gestures as closing of the eyes in delicate passages or facial expressions that ‘appear to have no causal relationship with the sound but certainly seem to play a huge role in the performance’.^[10]

In more conventionally written violin pieces gestures and movements are elements of technique of playing where the idea of desired sound, a compound of pitch, timbre, volume, and articulation, is followed by the coarticulated gestures of the left and the right hand that become the movement which results in producing that imagined sound. Depending on context, a goal sound can have several different approaches–movements– that can produce the same result. This can be illustrated by a simple example: the almost same tone quality can be achieved by either down- or up-bow stroke (figure 4.1). Although these two movements of the right hand are opposites, their goal is the production of a sound that is as similar as possible, and the movement is guided by that sound.^[11] Besides both of the movements being able to achieve the imagined sounding outcome, through practice they become embodied gestures that assure the possibility to repeat and achieve the same sounding outcome in any repeated performance. This is the difference I found with the repertoire in my research where the sounding outcome cannot be guaranteed, and where actions of the left and the right hand are not always coarticulated, nor easy to map on to precise ‘acoustic consequences’. ^[12]

Figure 4.1: Movement and gesture as tools

‘Supplementary’ movements in violin playing are common occurrences.^[13] These can be various movements such as dramatic bow flourishes of phrases or of the entire piece, emphasising with the body or the head the melodic phrasing, facial expressions, sway, and emotion the performer wants to convey. While in playing chamber music they are sometimes used as cues to communicate between the musicians, in solo performance these exaggerated gestures are communication with the audience and for the audience, and belong to the theatrical aspect of performance as a whole. These types of movements, although to some extent they can come out naturally as a by-product of emotional investment and the desire to convey more persuasively the interpretation, are not necessary for the sound production and for interpreting the music.^[14] Physicality is present in the work of Buccino, Cassidy, and Kourliandski not through extra-musical and theatrical gestures, but resides in a kind of gestural virtuosity that comes out from the physicality that is relatively consistent in its gestural outcome and with this consistency it directly interprets music regardless of potentially different and unexpected acoustic outcomes.

In these three pieces my starting thought to interpreting the music was often in the imagining of gesture independent of its final sounding result. This brought to my attention how this differs from a more common approach with other pieces where gesture and movements of the left- and right-hand act as coarticulated actions that together constitute technique of playing in pursuit to achieve the imagined sonic result. From this realisation a need to conceptualise sound-directed movement where units of gesture are musical material rather than solely tools to achieving sound was born. My initial inspiration to interpret gesture as musical material comes from pieces that use decoupling – ‘a separation of the various activities of sound production’^[15] for achieving ‘polyphonic texture’^[16] in string instruments – in their writing, as is the case in Buccino and Kourliandski, but also in Cassidy’s earlier work “the green is where”. However, as I was developing my practising methods applying the concept of thinking of the gesture itself as the starting point and the goal in facilitating the interpretation of a violin piece, I found that this approach can become a useful tool also in pieces that do not employ decoupling in the composition process, but which are complexly written and have unstable sounding results that require the performer to ensure inner separation of the actions from expectations of one fixed acoustic outcome.

In my experience with the repertoire, I found that it is not possible in fact to make an absolute distinction between traditional and decoupled treatment of hands. In example of Dario Buccino’s Finalmente il tempo è intero n° 16 who uses extreme decoupling in the compositional process, which in turn reflects with equal presence of separation of hands in interpretation, the nature of the piece still allows for moments where traditional coarticulated linked movements can arise. In another example, although decoupling is not a direct approach of Cassidy’s compositional process,^[17] considering gesture as material and applying decoupling as the process in practising allowed me to arrive at my interpretation and performance of the piece. Drawing from these experiences, I found that conscious awareness of different approaches to treating hands individually enabled me as a performer to have flexibility that allowed for finding more coherent interpretation of a piece with complex demands.

Furthermore, for understanding Finalmente il tempo è intero n° 16 it was essential for me to also understand the layers a unit of gesture on its own can have. Andrew Lewis and Xenia Pestova offer a definition of sounding gesture that goes beyond physical actions which excites a sounding body to include the ‘latent sounding gestures’ that do not in themselves create sound and ‘negative sounding gestures’, audible only through their absence.^[1] In this process of thinking of a violinist's gesture as an action that stems from the idea of gesture itself, the unit of gesture becomes what Godøy refers to as the ‘atom event’ extracted from the greater ‘coarticulation and contextual smearing’ that can develop its own ecosystem.^[19] Building on Godøy, in this ecosystem I identified three layers of materiality a unit of gesture can possess: atomic, sub-atomic, and meta-atomic. Through the prism of Finalmente il tempo è intero n° 16, in chapter 4.3 I expand on this concept in which each unit of gesture is considered as an ecosystem, where every detail of Buccino’s writing can be enacted.

• ^[1]Marcel Jousse, L’anthropologie du geste (Paris: Gallimard, 1974), p.687; my translation.
• ^[2]Two main pieces in focus are from the focus repertoire list: Finalmente il tempo è intero n° 16 by Dario Buccino and The Crutch of Memory by Aaron Cassidy, and Dmitri Kourliandski’s prePositions is part of my extended reference repertoire list. For the complete extended repertoire list, see Appendix B [Please see full Thesis, available via University of Huddersfield's repository.]
• ^[3]I formulated the phrase sound-directed movement drawing from object-directed movement, as defined by Novack, Wakefield, and Goldin-Meadow which for them has a goal ‘to achieve some change in the world' (Miriam A. Novack, Elizabeth M. Wakefield, and Susan Goldin-Meadow, ‘What makes a movement a gesture?’, Cognition, 146 (2016), p.340).
• ^[4]Christine Roquet, From Movement to Gesture: Thinking Between Music and Dance, trans. by Helen Boulac (Paris: Paris 8 Danse, 2019), p.1.
• ^[5]Christine Roquet, From Movement to Gesture, p.1.
• ^[6]Miriam A. Novack et al., ‘What makes a movement a gesture?’, p.354
• ^[7]Robert Hatten, ‘A Theory of Musical Gesture and Its Application to Beethoven and Schubert’, in Music and Gesture, ed. by Anthony Gritten and Elaine King (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), p. 1.
• ^[8]Gritten, Anthony and Elaine King, ‘Introduction’, in New Perspectives on Music and Gesture, ed. by Elaine King, and Anthony Gritten (New York: Routledge, 2011), p.2.
• ^[9]For more on music and gesture see Davidson 1993, 1994, 1995, 2001, 2002, Fatone et al. 2011, Jerde et al. 2006 Godøy 2003, 2006, 2011, Godøy et al. 2006, Gritten and King 2011, Lewis and Pestova 2012, Vines et al. 2006; Windsor 1996, 2000, 2004, 2008, Windsor et al. 1997, 2006
• ^[10]W. Luke Windsor, ‘Gestures in Music-making: Action, Information and Perception’, in New Perspectives on Music and Gesture, ed. by Anthony Gritten and Elaine King (New York: Routledge, 2011), pp.46-47.
• ^[11]Throughout formative and more advanced studies developing tools for equal control and application of movement on different bow strokes is part of the habitual training and goal. In addition to simpler actions and bow control, this is the desired direction for many more advanced and more difficult bow strokes, an example to be mentioned here can be upbow and downbow staccato, the common bow stroke regarded as advanced virtuoso achievement.
• ^[12]W. Luke Windsor, ‘Gestures in Music-making’, p.47.
• ^[13]W. Luke Windsor, p.46.
• ^[14]During my studies at Brussels Conservatory, one of my teachers, Igor Oistrakh, would for example advise against any excessive additional gesticulation and movements which, although visually they can amplify the audiences’ impression of a virtuosic and passionate interpretation, can draw energy away from the actual production of the sound.
• ^[15]Aaron Cassidy, ‘The String Quartet as Laboratory and Playground for Experimentation and Tradition (or, Opening Out/Closing In)’, Contemporary Music Review, 32.4 (2013), p.308.
• ^[16]Hübler, Klaus K., ‘Expanding the String Technique’, Interface, 13 (1984), 187-198.
• ^[17]In one of the working sessions that happened in the period between years 2018 and 2022, Cassidy shared that, while left and right hand have each their own assignments, the starting point and the goal of his compositional process is not to create a piece based in decoupling of the hands and actions, but that they still work towards a collective outcome.
• ^[18]Lewis and Pestova, p.2.
• ^[19]Godøy, ‘Coarticulated Gestural-Sonic Objects in Music’, pp.71-73.

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