Adjusting to the Other: Gesture in Karnatak Vocal Performance:
Music can be understood as a form of sonic, bodily and social interaction. This is evident in live performance where, in addition to sonic interaction between musicians, we can see performers and audience members responding to each other and to the sounds produced through modalities such as gesture, facial expression, utterance and dance.
In this talk, I explore music performance as interpersonal, embodied interaction through the lens of my research on gesture in the Karnatak music (Karnāṭaka Saṅgīta) tradition of South India, where vocalists tend to spontaneously gesture while they sing. Looking at both lessons and concert settings I examine details of gesture, gaze, facial expression, utterance and sung phrases that constitute interpersonal interaction. In particular, I examine participants’ use of addressee gestures and gestural backchannels, which are gestures made by the auditor rather than the speaker/singer. These can be considered audiencing gestures in the sense that they act to audience the other person – providing evidence that they are being attended to and understood. In light of these analyses and based on theoretical work from pragmatist and phenomenological traditions, I discuss how such gestures can contribute to performers’ grip over their interactions, both with other people and with the music performed.
Biography:
Lara Pearson is Professor for Ethnomusicology at the Institute of Musicology, University of Cologne. Her work explores gesture, vocalization and interaction in music-related contexts, with a focus on the performance and pedagogical practices of Karnatak vocalists and beatboxers. This research is highly interdisciplinary, combining methods from ethnomusicology, gesture studies, computational musicology and human movement science. In addition to her work on gesture, she has published on coarticulation in music, cross-cultural aesthetics, music notation and concepts of improvisation. She is currently Principal Investigator of the project Iconicity in co-singing gesture: the foundations of gesture-vocalization resemblance in beatboxing (IconS), funded by the DFG, and also leads the project, SongGesture: Co-singing gesture and vocal performance across three musical traditions, funded by the Research Council of Norway.