Gemme

Musical Gesture: Models and Experiments

During the first decade of the 21st century, gesture became the favored method of interaction with technologies with the general public and the musical community alike.  While musical writing has dematerialized, decomposes, and rebuilt the body of the musician-performer for the past 50 years, we can observe that for the past ten years there has been a strong multidisciplinary convergence around this research subject. The intelligence of the body, the understanding of its operation, human (performer, listener, audience member) - machine interfaces in the context of performance arts, the understanding and musical exploitation of expressive non-verbal gestures mobilize composers, performers, and computer scientists, but also mobilizes the domains of engineering, psychology, physiology, biomechanics, and cognitive sciences around the capture and analysis of musical gestures, as well as the gestural control of sound synthesis in live situations. However, this idea of gesture, commonly used in a large number of fields including the performing arts (theater, dance, performance), has only been the subject of nascent research in musicology.

Given this context, Gemme proposes a rigorous analysis of theoretical texts and musical works in addition to carrying out investigations prior and post score.  Understanding the idea of gesture, in the field of musicology, implies a broader view of the concept and of the work, of its structures, of its writing, even its style, towards an empiric musicology that takes into account production and performance. What theoretical and technical possibilities of the formalization of gestures do composers have? What gestural procedures do the express on paper and when the work is performed? This program will attempt to answer many of these questions, unifying issues that had been seen until now as autonomous: purely instrumental music and music on/for the stage, computer formalization and compositional formalization, the history of 20th century music, and investigations on the current trends on the arts scene.

Gemme will focus on four major themes:

1. Implicit theories of gesture, a study will establish a genealogy of the idea, with its categorizations and periods, and will provide a portrait of the current state of these issues.
2. Gestures on stage, study a paradigmatic method (that of Kagel) where the musical notion is connected with its staged expression in the framework of musical and instrumental theater.
3. Gesture and instrument, study of a contrasting paradigmatic method (that of Lachenmann) where the composition interrogates the detail of organological possibilities of the sound production (idea of "concrete instrumental music"), in relation with a political and social criticism of the associated expressive conventions.
4. Gesture and technology, a series of musical analyses of a group of reference scores dating from the 1970s to today, that decline several technical and computer paradigms that formalize and/or accompany the instrumental gesture.

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