Ready-to-Play: Musician preparation or social action?
| Author: | Parton, Katharine |
| Abstract: | |
| This paper examines interactions between musicians in rehearsal contexts, arguing that their artefact interaction occurs on a cline which moves from ‘everyday’ gestures, such as deixis to gestures which are highly developed, culturally mediated, situated gestures which are shaped by and through the specific physical characteristics and requirements of playing individual instruments. These gestures, moving in tandem along the cline outlined above, will be shown to occur on a second cline from non-sounding producing gestures to gestures which produce normatively expected musical sound; sound which can be culturally (in relation to Western music) or contextually (within an immediate, proximal context relating to the practice of music-making at hand) understood. This paper will focus its analysis on the gestures which occur in the mid-point of these clines. The analysis of these gestures will follow Goodwin’s (2003) approach to artefact and environment interaction. These gestures, this paper will argue, whilst not directly resulting in sound can be seen to be functionally part of the music-making, having either individual function (moving into the position required to ‘do’ sound) or social function (co-ordinating sound across interactants). These gestures, identified in data from a video-corpus of professional orchestral rehearsal, will be shown to be more than simply ‘pre-cursors’ or ‘preparation’ for subsequent, sound-producing gestures. This paper argues they are also performed without subsequent sound-producing gestures, in sequences which include both non-verbal behaviours and talk. Rather than treating these actions as errors (preparing to play at the ‘wrong’ time) it will be argued that these gestures can be performed to achieve social and interactional ends. |
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