Gesture and imagery in music performance : perspectives from North Indian classical music.

Abstract

The experience of music is a multi-faceted one, and entails complex visual and gestural engagement at different levels of sound production and reception.In the following pages I will discuss how a comprehensive understanding of this visual aspect necessarily involves consideration of bodily involvement in performance and how both are ultimately integral to the aural dimension of music.Performers use their bodies to make music, whether through their voice or by playing instruments; they move-more or less ostensibly-to communicate with fellow musicians and audiences, and-more or less deliberately-to accompany the flow of the music, or to support meanings associated with it.Other participants and listeners also, depending on the context of performance, move their bodies to the music, for example to dance, clap, express appreciation, or communicate with each other and with musicians.All these behaviors are regulated by genre-specific cultural codes and are embedded in the role that each individual takes on in the music event.Most of all, these movements and gestures, together with the visual experience that accompanies them, are integral to processes of music-making and reception: participating in a performance as well as "just" listening to music implies sharing these movements-by seeing them, by making them, or by associating sounds and memories with them.At the same time, musical sound is embodied through patterns of movement, and even listening (including remote listening to recordings, for example) involves experiencing this movement.Such embodiment of sound can be manifested through movement in performance, as well as in conversation, as people support the discussion of their experience of music through gesture and through imagery and metaphors; these images can be rich with extra-musical details, and can reveal information on the meanings and emotions that people associate with music.Rather than being a posteriori attachments, these visual elements are closely connected to musical sound: in fact, while retaining their cultural specificity, they are rooted in the same process that makes music a physical experience.Music experience is therefore a visual and bodily, as much as an auditory one: music is "seen," and is perceived as movement, as well as listened to.In this chapter I challenge notions of a disembodied nature of music shared among certain cultures (including Western art music), where the invisibility of the sound object often leads to the assumption of the ineffability of an abstract musical experience.On the contrary I will claim that music is experienced at a bodily level and-most importantly-that this experience can be Comment [AF1]: I would rather keep this.In studies of this kind it is normal practice to talk about "processes of embodiment".Comment [AF2]: I would prefer not to add this -these are still very early days in this kind of research and in any case we cannot talk about experimental data with certaintyThe analysis of performance in both its musical and visual aspects needs to be supported by ethnographic research aimed at carrying out enquiries into how people describe their experience of music, the extra-musical associations, images, and emotions they attach to it, and in particular how they express them both verbally and through gesture.In the next section I will focus on Hindustani (North Indian) art-or "classical"-music, and in particular on ethnographic work on the vocal genre of khyal (nowadays the most commonly heard classical genre across the North of India), and on enquiries carried out between 2005 and 2010 with a number of khyal singers. 1 While I suggest that this tradition is far from being a unique case, the rich and often openly articulated body of extra-musicalincluding visual-associations attached to it makes North Indian classical music an ideal object of consideration for this discussion. 1 The fieldwork in India was sponsored

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