Inscription, Gesture, and Social Relations: Notation in Karnatak Music (original) (raw)

Handwritten Notation in Karnatak Music: Memory and the Mediation of Social Relations

Musikalische Schreibszenen / Scenes of Musical Writing, 2023

In the South Indian musical tradition known as Karnāṭaka Saṅgīta, or Karnatak music, notation is often handwritten during lessons by either the teacher or student. This tendency to write music notation out by hand persists despite the existence of published notation for many compositions. In this paper we argue that the practice of handwriting notation has important affordances for musicians that likely account for its persistence: affordances relating to memorisation, ideals of musical lineage, authenticity, value and creativity in the style. We show how each of these features are supported by current notational practices and explore the interrelationships between them.

Gesture and the sonic event in Karnatak music

Empirical Musicology Review 8 (1) 2-14, 2013

This paper presents an analysis of the relationship between gesture and music in the context of a Karnatak vocal lesson recorded in Tamil Nadu, South India in September 2011. The study examines instances of correspondence between gesture and sonic event occurring during the lesson. Through this analysis the paper aims to contribute to the wider debate on the factors that determine gesture. Shape and trajectory are used in this study as means of describing and comparing gestures. The teacher’s hand movements are tracked and traced rendering the gestures as static shapes in still images and developing lines in moving images. Correspondences found between gestures and sonic features are discussed in relation to the physical movement required to produce the music. In addition, the circumstances in which correspondence is not found are analyzed and the extent to which the dynamic form of gesture is also influenced by the phrase as a whole is emphasized.

Coarticulation and Gesture: an Analysis of Melodic Movement in South Indian Raga Performance

Music Analysis, 2016

Music Analysis, 35(3), 280-313 This article presents an analysis of small-scale melodic movement in South Indian rāga performance, employing the concept of coarticulation, defined here as the tendency for the performance of a unit to be influenced by that which precedes or follows it. Coarticulation has been much studied in phonetics, and also explored to some extent in sign language and the kinematics of musical instrument performance. Here, I seek to account for variation in the performance of Karnatak musical units known as svaras (scale degrees of a rāga) and gamakas (ornaments) through the phenomenon of coarticulation, thus providing an analysis of small-scale melodic movement that focuses on the dynamic processes that form the style rather than categorisation of discrete elements. The material investigated is a video recording of ālāpana (improvisation) in rāga Toḍi performed by the Karnatak violinist T.V. Ramanujacharlu in Tamil Nadu, South India. A section of the recording is transcribed into staff notation and visualised through pitch contour graphs created in Praat sound analysis software. The hand movements required to produce the musical phrases are described from observation of the video alongside figures showing motion-tracked data. Interviews with musicians, participant observation, and the author’s experience as a student of Karnatak violin provide the foundation for interpretation of the material. Results show that coarticulation can be seen between svaras through the oscillatory gamakas with which they are performed. Atomistic and gestural conceptions of South Indian music are discussed, following which suggestions are made for the implications of this research in modeling the Karnatak style, and for potential applications in musical information retrieval. The published article can be accessed at http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/wol1/doi/10.1111/musa.12071/abstract

From the vocal gesture to the writing of music

2009

In the present study I will analyse the multifaceted functions of the external vocal gestures of the chironomical type and their influence on the first trace-forms of music writing : neumes. I will also outline the impact of vocal gestures within the dynamics of the learning process in singing and in the transitional process from oral musical culture to music writing. My aim is to extend the study of vocal gestures towards the exegesis of the writing of music. From an ontological and epistemological standpoint I will draw hypotheses concerning the processes leading from an audiooral musical memory culture to an oral-visual musical memory culture all the while maintaining the former in our Western countries. I will rely on a methodology as it stands at the crossroads of clinical observations on the use of vocal gestures as mnemonic auxiliaries for singers, and a theoretical reflection on perspective processes, from ontological and epistemological perspectives. From my theory on external vocal gestures I will develop an analysis of the first musical sign-traces (Vitale 2007b; 2007c; 2008a; 2009a). My personal results will be backed up by videos and different materials. The gestures of the instrument-voix-and not those of another musical instrument-are truly the tools that made possible the magical and paradoxical act of "fixing" Music (Vitale 2007b; 2009a).

The Ethnographer as Apprentice: Embodying Sociomusical Knowledge in South India

Anthropology and Humanism, 2012

This article focuses on the social significance and the cultural politics of the body-sensorial knowledge acquired through learning music. It considers music as a means for producing particular kinds of embodied subjects, as a repetitive practice and a mode of discipline that inculcates and hones gendered and classed sensibilities. These ideas are elaborated in reflection on the author's experience of learning South Indian classical (Karnatic) music through apprenticeship, multiple pedagogical encounters, and learning to appreciate music in the company of others. [embodiment, sensorial knowledge, gender, apprenticeship, music] One of the more striking stories my music teacher told me, in the course of my long apprenticeship learning South Indian classical music with her, was of the strong ambivalence she had experienced about music when she was younger. She related this story, which I paraphrase here, during a lull one afternoon in 1998 as we sat on the floor in her house in Chennai with our violins in our laps and the notes I had been making to learn a particular composition scattered on the floor around us. As the daughter chosen to absorb and carry on her father's musical art, she had felt intensely jealous of her younger sister, who was sent off to boarding school and college. Why, she wondered, should only her younger sister get the opportunity to become educated and eventually work outside home? How could they have been born of the same parents yet be so unequally treated, one kept at home in the bonds of hereditary musicianship, and the other sent off to get a college education so that she could move beyond her family? My teacher, barely more than a teenager herself at the time, began to doubt if she were her father's child at all. She retreated to the upper verandah of the house and refused to eat, talk, or play the violin for two weeks. Her father, almost blind, a genius absorbed in his music and busy with students who came to him daily to learn, did not notice her absence. It was only after her mother said something to him that he came up the stairs to where she was sitting. She expected harsh words from him, so was surprised when he instead gently asked, "So, you are doubting whether you are really my child or not?" But rather than simply laying the doubt to rest, he said, "You play your violin. Listen to that sound. And you will know." At first she had resented the fact that he had avoided her question, but then she began to appreciate the genius of his reply, which had in effect already bs_bs_banner

Towards a sound-gesture analysis in Hindustani Dhrupad vocal music: effort and raga space

Physical effort has often been regarded as a key factor of expressivity in music performance, nevertheless systematic experimental approaches to the subject have been rare. In Hindustani vocal music we observe singers featuring a striking use of manual gestures, whereby they appear to engage with melodic motives by employing and manipulating imaginary objects or materials through apparently effortful gestures of stretching, pulling, pushing, collecting, throwing etc. This observation suggests that some patterns of change in music features may relate to basic sensorymotor activities defined by the effortful interactions that these simple (virtual) objects and their physical properties may afford. The present study explores the role of physical effort while interacting with virtual objects in the rendering of melodic phrases in the Dhrupad genre of Hindustani vocal music. It follows an empirical methodological approach by analysing a representative performance of a single Dhrupad singer through video and audio recordings, as well as interviews. The main part of the paper is dedicated to the classification of recurrent bodily interactions with virtual objects from the viewpoint of a thirdperson and the exploration of associations between body gesture classes, physical effort levels and characteristic melodic phrases. Results indicate that the body gestures under study are not combined in an arbitrary way with the melody, and the level of performed bodily effort is not uniform over any pitch range, but instead relate systematically to the strict grammatical rules and the pitch space organisation of the raga.

MUSICAL GESTURE: FROM BODY AND MIND TO SOUND

MUSICA movet : affectus, ludus, corpus, 2019

According to the theory of embodied cognition, gestures are at the very heart of human cognitive processes. The idea of embodied cognition is based on cognitive schemata and categories that emerge from the amassed experience of being and acting in the world. In human cognitive processes, many features of cognition are shaped by aspects of the entire body of the organism, so the physical domain serves as a source domain for understanding an idea or conceptual domain, using the tools of metaphor. As a basic element of the physical domain, the phenomenon of gesture has garnered particular attention and it has been recently studied in various fields such as phenomenology, EMT (Extended Mind Thesis), psychology, neuro-phenomenology, neo-cognitivism, robotics, critical theory, linguistics, neuroscience, constructivism, but also in music theory. In music, gestures encompass a large territory-from purely physical (bodily) on one side of the axis to mental (imagined) on the other. From a student's adopting of a teacher's posture, even facial expressions, to the syndrome of "watching" music, as in conductors' and players' gestures, both practical (sound producing) and expressive (auxiliary), to metaphorical concepts of up and down in intervals, scales, or as recognizable idioms of a composer's language (strategic) or style (stylistic), the phenomenon of gesture in music can be explored and perceived from many different viewpoints. In this paper, the issue of the inseparability of body and sound in musical practice will be explored, especially how these two basic types of gesture in music can intertwine and help deepen its performance. For this purpose, Alexandra Pierce's embodied analytical exercises will be used, those which enable the performer to explore gesturally the expressive meaning of a musical piece. It will be demonstrated that musical gesture supports performance-oriented analysis more than we think, know, or imagine.