man body as connected and mutually inspiring each other, as part of a circuit,
or an ecosystem, not necessarily always in balance. And we might see gesture as
providing crucial connections, between the aural and visual, as well as between
the artist and the public. But how are these relations configured?
Let us look at the connection between the body of the musical performer and
the music. Maróthy points out the importance of gesture in the following obser-
vation.
Successful synthetic simulations of musical sounds have led to realising that music is
made humanly important not by a“violin sound”or by a“piano sound”alone but by
their shaping through the gestures of a performing artist. Instead of pre-program-
ming these through sophisticated softwares, computer musicians have returned to
the human gestures themselves in order to control the sonic flow produced by inter-
active systems of live electronics.Thus, the“shaping [of instrument sound] through the gestures of a performing
artist”is vital for achieving an adequate result. So what kind of gestures should
these be? As Maróthy further notes,“standard performance orders likelargo,
allegro, let alonedolce,espressivoor evenlusinghiero(in Beethoven’s Quartet C
Sharp Minor) hint at behavior patterns rather than at abstract musical quali-
ties”.The task of the performing artist, here articulated by the composer, is to
endow the performance with a particular“feeling”anchored in gestural embo-
died life. Just as that embodied life, in its turn, may provide inspiration for wri-
ters of songs. The body cultures relating to contemporary rap music, to the Bra-
zilianbossa novaof the earlys, and to classic Argentinian tango music by
Carlos di Sarli, each of these are as widely apart as they are gesturally well-
integrated with their music. This integration of body culture and music means
that by the help ofseeingthe music, in terms of the musicians playing it and
dancers dancing it, we may understand the music better. Perhaps this is because
one dimension of understanding music is to understand the gestural world it
forms a part of: the postures, attitudes and moods of the musicians playing it,
as well as the fitting responses from dancers and the public enjoying it, not to
mention the clothing styles and life forms that nurture it and are nurtured by it.
Another term that may be productively linked up to gesture isattitude. Think
about how a musician playing, a dancer dancing, will take on a certain attitude.
This attitude again may provide an organizing principle for the more specific
gestures co-constituting the music and the dance. Attitudes may well be de-
scribed as ways of relating emotionally, as indicated by terms like care, seduc-
tion, aggression, threat, sadism, joy, love, melancholy and despair. Such single
words, of course, will never summarize complex attitudes and emotional condi-
tions, but they may indicate some relevant trajectories for explorations of the
172 Arild Fetveit