The Importance of Bodily Gesture in Sofia Gubaidulina's Music for Low Strings

The first part of the paper offers a brief overview of gestural studies in music and linguistics in an effort to develop some terminology for use in the analyses. The second part of the paper provides examples of gestural symbolism in a number of Gubaidulina's works for low strings. The final part of my paper examines Gubaidulina's silent works-those in which gestures are prescribed but no sound results-and offers some directions for further study.Received March 2009[1] The role of the body in musical performance has recently received quite a lot of study. Work by Jane Davidson, Suzanne Cusick, Andrew Mead, and others has turned our attention from the notes on the page to the activities involved in transforming those notes into sound.(1) In most cases, the gesture is seen as subservient to the sound it creates. In her "Cello and Bow Thinking" article, Elisabeth Le Guin states: "In terms of compositional process, the visual images created by the physical gestures of playing will tend to be by-products, and not sources, of aural and kinesthetic impulses [...] but it is important to distinguish between their functional secondariness in the creative process, and their very considerable problematization in latter-day understandings of instrumental music" (Le Guin 1999, par. 54). Le Guin suggests that the visual aspects of performance are perhaps not germane to the initial working out of musical material (by composer or performer), but are nonetheless important to the audience. This also seems to be the case in linguistic studies of gesture-the gesture usually "accompanies" the spoken word, placing the visual second to the aural. Richard Leppert goes a step further and argues that music must be seen in order to be fully grasped. According to Leppert, sight mediates between what we hear and our bodily experience of music. In the introduction to his book The Sight of Sound, he asserts, "Whatever music is 'about,' it is inevitably about the body" (Leppert 1993, xx).[2] Instrumental music in the twentieth century has seen an increase in the importance of the body in performance. Many works incorporate (either directly or indirectly) an element of theatricality in addition to the purely sonic content. Sofia Gubaidulina is one of many composers whose music features an increased attention to the body. Some of her works require spatial separation of performing forces; others require interaction between live music and recorded sound. Both techniques rely on the audience's visual inspection of the performance arena. In some instances, I would argue that practical bodily gestures-those movements of the body that are concerned with producing sound from one's instrument-are actually more important to the work than the resulting sounds. In this paper, I examine some of these passages with a particular focus on Gubaidulina's writing for cello and double bass. I have chosen these particular instruments for three reasons: first, because Gubaidulina has written a considerable amount of music featuring these instruments; second, because these instruments offer a large canvas on which to observe bodily movement; and third, because as a double bassist, I have first-hand knowledge of the physical demands of the instrument. The first part of the paper uses examples from Gubaidulina's music to formulate a theory of bodily gesture. The second part of the paper provides examples of gestural symbolism in a number of her works for low strings. The final part of my paper examines her "silent" works and offers some directions for further study.[3] I would like to begin by clarifying some terminology. The word gesture in particular is quite a loaded term. In music, the term is usually used to describe a small musical unit, akin to a motive. The distinction between motive and gesture is a fine one. A motive can be defined as the smallest recognizable musical unit. Motives have distinct pitch and rhythmic profiles, and are generally shorter than a measure. …