Musical gesture

The concept of musical gestures encompasses a large territory stretching from details of sound-production to more global emotive and aesthetic images of music, and also include considerations of cultural-stylistic vs. more universal modes of expression.

Rahaim's work approaches gesture and vocalization as parallel expressions of melody, investigates isomorphisms between gesture space and raga space, and studies the transmission and inheritance of "paramparic bodies"--vocal/postural/gestural dispositions handed down through teaching lineages.

Gesture draws upon the close interaction (and intermodality) of a range of human perceptual and motor systems to synthesize the energetic shaping of motion through time into significant events with unique expressive force.

The biological and cultural motivations of musical gesture are further negotiated within the conventions of a musical style, whose elements include both the discrete (pitch, rhythm, meter) and the analog (dynamics, articulation, temporal pacing).

Musical gestures are emergent gestalts that convey affective motion, emotion, and agency by fusing otherwise separate elements into continuities of shape and force.