Corporeal Musical Structure: A Gestural-Kinesthetic Approach to Toru Takemitsu’s Rain Tree Sketch II

Abstract

The music of Tōru Takemitsu’s Rain Tree Sketch II (1994) entails a procession of discrete gestures that are delineated by moments of repose. The performer’s grasp of the piece lies in its physicality of movement: each gesture and in-between stillness are both heard and felt as an aggregate of velocities, directions, and intentions of the body. Drawing upon Carrie Noland’s concept of “vitality affects,” I take the performative gesture, encompassing both visually accessible movement and inwardly felt kinesthesia, as a starting point for the analysis of Rain Tree Sketch II. Concepts of effort and shape taken from Rudolf Laban’s dance theory provide a framework for creating a new methodology of enhanced trace-forms to analyze gesture and kinesthesia. The analysis of gestures reveals the coexistence of opposite effort qualities and shapes in an expanded corporeal space, resonating with Takemitsu’s ideal of reconciling contradictory sounds, as noted in his collection of essays Confronting Silence (1995). Husserl’s notions of retention and protention, viewed through the lens of embodiment, and Laban’s concepts of effort states and effort recovery are brought to bear on the still moments, showing the piece to have a throbbing, embodied rhythmic structural arc. This new methodology centering on gestural-kinesthetic details provides the tools to articulate structural sensations that are often overlooked but lie at the center of musical experience.

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