Zum Konzept musikalischer Gestik

When hearing music as music, we hear motion in it, action even. Much of this action is gestural in quality. Richard Wagner’s writings about musical gesture as intimately linked with dramatic gesture, speak of this quality. The corporeality implied in Wagner’s understanding, however, has been largely abstracted away in music aesthetics and music theory since then. The dominant term in formalist analysis is Gestalt, namely, the structure of ideal motion. It appears devoid of the sensual, stripped of its actual bodily feeling and replaced by an act of imagination; in the music aesthetics of Carl Dahlhaus, Roger Scruton and Jerrold Levinson, and in the semiotic approach of Robert Hatten, for instance, the term gesture is retained, but conceptually limited to a metaphoric use: to talk of musical gesture there is to transfer its meaning from the domain of bodily expression. The latter concept does not explain how the transfer makes sense instead of being arbitrary to the musical experience (it only states that it does, and leaves the role of its apt application to the expert critic). My purpose in this text is to rethink the concept of musical gesture, integrate its actual sensual dimension, and hint at its rich potential for the analysis of music. I argue that the proprioceptivity of bodily gestures is extremely rich, spanning kinetic, haptic, topological, even emotional characteristics, all included in their understanding as felt in the lived body. Keeping this in mind, the audio-visual-tactile perception of one’s gesture when making a sound oneself, by sliding one’s hand over a piece of paper, say, provides the experiential backdrop to an empathic completion of a gesture as heard. A heard sonic shape thus becomes more than a Gestalt: it acquires a feel; ambiguous to some degree, but grounded in the very mundane experience of one’s own very refined gestural repertoire. This widened concept, I argue, elucidates music as being something not only understood, but something grasped and felt. I show this elaborated concept of musical gesture to be relevant to the understanding of expressivity in large scale thematic variation, taking Brahms’s Intermezzo op. 118,6 in E-flat Minor as an illustration. Provided one views music as something that occurs in aesthetic experience, then gesture is here shown as intersubjective and musically immanent.