Contemporary Music Review

ISSN: 0749-4467 (Print) 1477-2256 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/gcmr20

Go To Hell: Towards a Gesture-Based

Compositional Practice

Stefan Östersjö

To cite this article: Stefan Östersjö (2016) Go To Hell: Towards a Gesture-Based Compositional
Practice, Contemporary Music Review, 35:4-5, 475-499, DOI: 10.1080/07494467.2016.1257625

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2016.1257625

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Contemporary Music Review, 2016
Vol. 35, Nos. 4–5, 475–499, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2016.1257625

Go To Hell: Towards a Gesture-Based

Compositional Practice
Stefan Östersjö

This paper discusses musical gesture from an understanding of musical perception as

embodied and enactive, also drawing specifically on Denis Smalley’s [(2007). Space-
form and the acousmatic image. Organised Sound, 12(1), 35–58] analysis of
performed space. I will provide examples of how choreographies (performed by
musicians, with and without their instruments), new music (for Vietnamese and
Western instruments), installations, and video art have all been drawn from analysis of
gesture in Östersjö’s performance of the guitar composition Toccata Orpheus by Rolf
Riehm [1990. Toccata Orpheus. Munich: Ricordi]. In Riehm’s piece, the bodily action
of the performer is treated as an intentional compositional parameter and the notated
structure thus generates a specific choreography in performance. In Go To Hell, this
approach is taken further towards the development of a gesture-based compositional
practice, where composition is understood, not as the organisation of sound objects, but
as the structuring of gestural-sonic objects [Godøy, R. I. (2006). Gestural-sonorous
objects: Embodied extensions of schaeffer’s conceptual apparatus. Organised Sound, 11
(2), 149–157; Östersjö, S. (2008). SHUT UP ‘N’ PLAY! Negotiating the musical work
(PhD thesis). Lund University, Malmö].

Keywords: Musical Gesture; Embodied Cognition; Transcription; Performer’s Analysis

1. Introduction
In this paper, I will discuss musical gesture from an understanding of musical percep-
tion as embodied and enactive (Barsalou, 2008; Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1991).
Following Godøy’s (2006) critique of the concept of acousmatic listening and his pro-
posal of the notion of the gestural-sonic object, I conceive of musical gesture as an inte-
gration of aural and spatial/visual movement in human perception. It is essential to
acknowledge that movement is not only a visual phenomenon but is also experienced
through the proprioceptive system (Edlund, 2003; Proske & Gandevia, 2012). Musical
gesture emerges from a performer’s interactions with the affordances1 of musical
materials and instruments, situated in a particular space and articulated in time. A

© 2017 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group

476 S. Östersjö
performed space has multiple dimensions, discussed by Denis Smalley as stretching
from ‘gestural space’, as it is framed by the performer’s body and an instrument, via
‘ensemble space’, through the interaction with other musicians, to ‘arena space’, ‘the
whole public space inhabited by performers and listeners, within which gestural
space and ensemble space are nested’ (Smalley, 2007, p. 56). I suggest that a ‘perfor-
mer’s analysis’ may depart from embodied understandings of musical material and,
as such, can complement quantitative methods in research in music.

2. A Point of Departure: Rolf Riehm’s Toccata Orpheus

The starting point for the artistic work discussed is Toccata Orpheus (Riehm, 1990), a
composition for guitar solo by the German composer Rolf Riehm. It is a technically
challenging piece of music, but its intricate material emerges from conceptual ideas
that constitute the source for a more far-reaching challenge. It was only through con-
versations in rehearsal with the composer that I came to realise how the composition
also transgresses the conventional boundaries of concert hall music. Further, Toccata
Orpheus is built on musical material that suggests ways in which musical composition
and performance can be understood as gesture. I will discuss how this guitar compo-
sition became the source for a large scale inter-media project involving a number of
artists from different disciplines, and also how this process may suggest the possibility
of a gesture-based understanding of musical composition.

2.1. Some Basic Concepts

The fundamental playing technique in Toccata Orpheus is tapping, a playing technique
which affords the sonically unique feature of two simultaneous pitches produced with
the strike of a single finger on the fretboard. This sonority fascinated the composer,
and in particular the possibility of plucking a divided string also on the left hand
side of a fingered pitch. What emerged from this principle is a complex weave of
actions where the player’s hands constantly shift position. Hence, from the highly
detailed action notation, using two staffs for the actions of each hand, a musical struc-
ture emerges that consists of a choreography of movement over the body of the instru-
ment (see Figure 1). In addition to the score, the composition is further defined in a
preface of 24 A4 pages.
In 2004 I organised a series of rehearsals with the composer with the explicit inten-
tion of documenting the performance practice of his music (Östersjö, 2008). I made
video documentation of my rehearsals with the composer and made qualitative analy-
sis of this material. It was only through this analysis that a more comprehensive under-
standing of the significance of body movement in the composition emerged. I came to
realise that in many instances, the physical gesture is more central than the sounding
result, and there are many examples of actions in the piece that produce no sound
whatsoever. Instead, theatrical qualities emerge and, with the explicit references that
the piece makes to the myth of Orpheus—also enhanced by a prose poem by the
 Contemporary Music Review 477

Figure 1 Rolf Riehm’s guitar composition Toccata Orpheus, page 1. Reproduced with per-
mission from Edition Ricordi, Berlin.
Source: A video of a performance of the entire piece can be found following this link https://
www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fy-0JKaCz9g.
478 S. Östersjö
composer which is published as part of the preface to the score—a performance of the
piece is intended to constitute an embodiment of the persona of Orpheus, an instruc-
tion which situates the piece outside of the conventions of Western concert hall
performance.

2.2. From Rehearsals to an Analytical Understanding

The nature and function of the performer’s movements in the piece demand a further
discussion and I would like to turn to a short rehearsal clip2 with the composer to look
at one instance, taken from the second line of the first page. The discussion concerns
the annotation leichtfussig in the middle of the second line (see Figure 1), an instruction
which has no direct relation to sound production but rather to a theatrical gesture
which the composer performs with a very distinct quality. However, this gesture, as
performed by the composer in the rehearsal, did not seem to translate very well to per-
formance while holding and playing a guitar. Instead, I developed a completely differ-
ent gesture of hand and arm movement with the ambition to capture a similar
intentionality in body movement (see Video 1).
An ecological understanding of musical performance starts with the human body.
The embodied mind of a musician interacts with the affordances (Gibson, 1986) of
musical instruments and other materials. When the resistance of materials is low,
the interaction between performer and instrument can be described as a state of res-
onance, while a creative interaction can also take place as a ‘denial of habit’ which I
have previously described as an oscillation between ‘resonance’ and ‘critique’
(Östersjö, 2012). Already the basic performance techniques of Toccata Orpheus, with
the shifting roles of the hands which it implies, challenges the habitus (Coessens &

Video 1 Rehearsal with Rolf Riehm: page 1. Please see the online full text version to access
Video 1, or the video can be accessed via the supplemental material tab: http://dx.doi.org/
10.1080/07494467.2016.1257625.
 Contemporary Music Review 479
Östersjö, 2014) of a classically trained guitarist in a number of ways. First, the normal
division into one plucking hand and one hand stopping the strings and modifying the
fingered note is exchanged for an unlearning situation where the functions are shared.
Second, the classical seating position was developed to allow the performer to keep the
instrument fixed without the aid of the left arm, thus allowing the left hand to move
freely over the fretboard. Therefore, when the right hand plays on the fretboard the
instrument is less securely fixed.
This brings us to a second example from my rehearsals with Riehm which, inciden-
tally, has a direct connection to the function of the classical seating position (see Video
2). In the working session, we were discussing an event (in fact only one single note) in
the last bar of page five in the score. According to the performance instructions, an
extensive vibrato should be applied to a fingered G♯, with so much force that it
makes the instrument shake horizontally in sympathetic movement. In addition to
this instruction for the left hand action, three fingers of the right hand should hold
strings 4, 5 and 6. Due to the vibrato movement of the left hand a squeaking noise
from the strings should be produced by the nails of the right hand.
My first priority is to ensure that I have understood the performance instructions
properly. Regarded as a sound object, it can be analysed as a compound unit consisting
of an impulsive excitation (an ordinario plucking of a fingered G♯ on the guitar) followed
by a sustained sound indeed atypical of a plucked instrument, achieved by the combi-
nation of the vibrato and the continuous scratching sound from the nails ‘fingering’
the bass strings. The sonic characteristics are already there, however, Riehm is not
content but seems unclear of what is missing. He starts reading the score, seemingly
trying to remember his intentions, and then states that ‘the instrument should shake

Video 2 Rehearsal with Rolf Riehm: page 5. Please see the online full text version to access
Video 2, or the video can be accessed via the supplemental material tab: http://dx.doi.org/
10.1080/07494467.2016.1257625.
480 S. Östersjö
more’. I had trouble to see the point in Riehm’s wish, since the sounding result already
seemed quite convincing. But if we understand Riehm’s comment as a reference to the
visual gesture and not to the sound production, an analysis of this event, using the
concept of the gestural-sonic object (Godøy, 2006), might clarify his intention:
The bar starts with a discontinuous excitatory gesture, immediately followed by a
continuous gesture, a vibrato that is so wide and forceful that it should make the
instrument shake in the horizontal direction. This shaking of the instrument is an
aspect of the gesture that does not contribute to the sound production. In other
words, the second action is a compound gesture, adding to the sound-producing
gesture3 of the vibrato a second gesture-type, which could be understood as sound-
accompanying gesture, following the movement of the left hand doing the vibrato.
As can be seen in the clip, this sound-accompanying gesture, with the sympathetic
movement of the instrument resulting from the vibrato, turns out to be not so easy to
achieve, and Riehm is a bit puzzled by this, until he realises that—for a classically
trained performer, seated in a traditional playing position—the instrument cannot
move sideways. But of course, this particular guitarist is also keen to discuss the
sound production instead of the shaking of the guitar: I quite stubbornly return,
time after time, to the sound of the G♯, wondering if it perhaps might be fingered
on the second string instead of the indicated first string. Riehm again underlines
that it is ‘a theatrical effect’, and eventually I begin to get the idea that a certain expres-
sive layer should be added in this bar by the visual action. The passage does not ask for
just any kind of shaking of the instrument but a specifically visualised, romantic
expression by an ‘extended’ use of the ‘classical’ vibrato, leading to a sympathetic
movement in the instrument. It is the intimacy in the visual expression, in combi-
nation with the dialectic between vibrato/scratching strings in the resulting sound,
that creates the expressive meaning in this bar. It takes me a while to find the solution
of lifting the instrument slightly, thus giving space for a visual ‘vibrato’ also.
But how can we best understand a musical gesture such as this? I find Godøy’s
concept of the ‘gestural-sonic object’—such as employed above—to allow for an ade-
quate description of this category of musical material. The expressive unit, of the visual
gesture and the sonic result of the action, cannot be analysed merely as a sound object.
It follows from the discussion above that the compound unit of the second gesture, and
especially the element of sound-accompanying action, is of crucial importance in order
to achieve the expression intended by the composer.
I have been intrigued by this piece for many years, seeing how its choreography and the
theatrical elements that emerge from it sit so badly in the contemporary concert hall tra-
dition. In 2008 I made a first attempt to present the piece as part of a multimedia installa-
tion where the audience is invited into a space with an interactive video and sound
installation—by Joanna Walker, Stephen Bluemm, and Henrik Frisk—a subterranean
landscape in which the visual artist Leif Holmstrand would evoke some of the violence
of the Orpheus myth by sawing a guitar to pieces. In this setting I performed the piece in a
version worked out together with the choreographer Claudine Ulrich. However success-
ful this installation may have been, I was not content with how the guitar piece itself
 Contemporary Music Review 481
functioned in the context. The piece continued to haunt my imagination since I felt that
the conceptual novelty of the composition had not yet been fully projected to an audi-
ence. But I was also driven by a rather vague intuition of a wider implication of the qual-
ities found in the gestural content of the piece. Again, informed by my initial analysis of
the score building on the concept of the gestural-sonic object, I was eventually able to
verbalise a conception of a compositional practice based on my exploration of
Riehm’s score which led to the formation of a senior international research project on
gesture in musical performance called ‘Music in Movement’. But this analysis rested
also on developments in a number of related research fields looking at perception of
music from the perspective of embodied cognition. An outline of those findings,
which underpin this piece of research, follows in the next section.

3. Music as Gesture
3.1. Musical Gesture and Embodied Cognition
Musical perception is multimodal (Livingstone & Thompson, 2006; Thompson,
Graham, & Russo, 2005). Hence, human perception of music is not acousmatic but
is stored as motor-mimetic images of movement, action, and sound (Godøy, 2006).
Embodied music cognition builds on the hypothesis of action-perception coupling
as the controlling factor in the interaction between the subjective experience of the
individual and the environment. Furthermore, music cognition is considered to be
situated, that is, embedded in an environment, and enacted, or, put into practice
through action (Barsalou, 2008; Varela et al., 1991). Recent research on musical
gesture finds gestural images to be integral to the perception of music (Desmet
et al., 2012; Godøy & Leman, 2010; Gritten & Elaine, 2009; Henbing & Leman,
2007). The sensorimotor system makes the motor action of producing gesture and
the perceptual interpretation of it into interchangeable entities (Hatten, 2006). In
studies of the projection of musical expression in performance, visual gesture has
turned out to be a strong component (Clarke & Davidson, 1998; Dahl & Friberg,
2007; Davidson, 1993, 1994, 1995, 2007). Indeed, Jane Davidson finds that ‘vision
can be more informative than sound in the perceiver’s understanding of the perfor-
mer’s expressive intentions’ (1993, p. 112). Gallese and Lakoff suggest an interactionist
theory that explains our ways of making sense of the world from the claim that
‘imagination is meaning’ and that imagination is embodied, ‘structured by our con-
stant encounter and interaction with the world via our bodies and brains’ (2005,
p. 456). Marc Leman develops a theory of musical communication along the same
lines, arguing that ‘musical communication is based on the sharing of neural structures
that pertain to movement’ (2008, p. 161). Further, he proposes that intention is pro-
jected to music in the same way as in other social interaction. In musical performance,
patterns of sonic energy evoke bodily gestures that are culturally meaningful to an indi-
vidual, again, because our imagination is embodied.
482 S. Östersjö
3.2. Gesture to Sound Mapping in Interactive Systems
In choreography, research into the mapping of dancer’s movements to electronic or
digital systems goes back to the 1960s (deLahunta & Bevilacqua, 2007). One
ground-breaking event was the collaboration between John Cage and Merce Cunning-
ham in 1965 in the development of an interactive system for the multimedia pro-
duction of Variations V (Miller, 2001). Their work also constitutes an example of
how this development of artistic and scientific practice has tended to be of a collabora-
tive and distributed nature. Since the 1990s, with the development of more powerful
computer systems, the development has been rapid, and is now beyond the stage of
experimentation, as is expressed in a recent review article by Bevilacqua, Schnell,
and Alaoui (2011). They discuss sensor- and video-based capture systems, analysed
into three paradigms: body-, space-, and time-related technologies (Bevilacqua
et al., 2011). Another core factor is the exploration of the affordances of computing
technologies. A common factor in these explorations is the translation between move-
ment and sound that either works as ‘sonification’ of movement data, or as ‘visualisa-
tion’ of audio data. Depending on the organisation of the choreographed or
compositional work in how the data are shaped, the outcome may be more or less
clearly related to music and choreography.

3.3. The Musical Body and Artistic Knowledge

The link between multimodal experiences and multimedia technologies can be seen as
an extension of a long tradition that puts the human body (again) at the centre of
musical activity, as it is has always in been in many non-Western music cultures
(Cross, 2010; Leman, 2008). Interestingly enough, Leman takes the interaction
between a performer and a musical instrument as point of departure in his develop-
ment of a conceptual framework for multimedia art that builds on the communication
model discussed above. He assumes that a ‘detailed study of the way in which perfor-
mers handle acoustic instruments may reveal basic components of an embodied inter-
action and communication pattern that can be exploited for the development of
electronic interactive systems’ (Leman, 2008, p. 139).

3.4. Music in Movement

The notion of a gesture-based understanding of musical composition, suggested by my
interpretation of Toccata Orpheus, laid the ground for Music in Movement, a multidis-
ciplinary artistic research project with the aim of developing artistic methods which
merge the practices of choreographer and musician towards a gesture-based paradigm
for musical composition. Funded by the Swedish Research Council, this work has been
carried out with a number of composers and performers but also artists from other
disciplines. Music in Movement has resulted in a series of collaborative artistic projects,
starting out in January 2012 and brought to a close in December 2015.
 Contemporary Music Review 483
Since the fundamental concepts for the research project emerged from my interpret-
ation of Rolf Riehm’s composition, it seemed necessary to take the opportunity to
again address the conceptual challenges posed by this piece. The making of this new
inter-media work, eventually entitled Go To Hell, also became a piece of method devel-
opment for the research project at large. Initially, we wanted to find a setting that could
draw the audience into the world of ideas of the piece. A dismantled nuclear reactor at
KTH (the Royal Technical Institute) in Stockholm came to mind. It was a space that
evokes danger, and affords descending since it is situated almost 30 metres below the
ground. The audience would walk down the stairs, and when they entered the reactor
hall, an installation was running in the offices that, interestingly enough, were located
in the reactor hall itself. Situated in this space, the gestural content of the Toccata
Orpheus became the source for new video works, choreographies, a light and sound
installation, and new music for trio.

4. Performance and Analysis

My analysis of the score using the concept of the gestural-sonic object was essential for
the development of the concepts behind Music in Movement. But the relation between
analysis and performance has been subject to much debate in music research. While
making note that the emerging interest in performance in music psychology—
which started in the late 1980s—has given way for an emerging field of ‘performance
analysis’, rarely carried out by performers, José Bowen summarises the widened set of
methods afforded by this approach:

While performance analysis also uses recorded performances as source documents,

it is a wider study than what I described so far. Performance analysis includes the
study of how the music sounds, but it also considers performance attitudes,
gesture, social context, and audience response. (1996, p. 19)

With an important modulation of the term, Rink (2002) proposes that a ‘performer’s
analysis’ may put a distinct focus on music’s temporal nature, and hence a focus on
shape rather than structure, and attention to prescriptive rather than descriptive analy-
sis. More recent developments along similar lines point to a focus on identifying ‘the
potential elements of a performance’ but also, that ‘the physical actions of the perfor-
mer not only inform but shape the analytical awareness that may emerge’ (Rink, 2015,
p. 145).
In the study of performer’s memorisation of scored music, the notion of ‘perform-
ance cues’ has been proposed (Chaffin, Lisboa, Logan, & Begosh, 2009). Five distinct
categories were identified in a study of cellist Tania Lisboa’s memorisation of the
prelude in Bach’s sixth cello suite. They related to expressive qualities, interpretative
decisions, intonation and basic technique separately for left and right hand (Chaffin
et al., 2009, pp. 2–3). These observations gain further significance through Godøy’s
development of the concept of ‘chunking’, understood as a fundamental feature of
484 S. Östersjö
musical perception through which the percept is divided into ‘action chunks’ (Godøy,
Jensenius, & Nymoen, 2010). Although chunking is certainly related to the auditory
stimuli, it should not be understood as equivalent to phrasing or articulation; it is
instead inherently related to movement, starting at one point and stopping at
another. But, rather than aiming at identifying the smallest denominators in musical
perception, chunking emerges also through its combination with the concept of co-
articulation, all about how continuity emerges in music perception (Godøy et al.,
2010).
I propose that a substantial layer in a performer’s analysis can be carried out as an
identification of chunks and supra-chunks, and of the co-articulation of musical
gesture in these materials, hereby situating the analysis in the physicality of musical
performance. But, if these phenomena emerge from action, what is the role of the per-
former’s body in the making of such a performer’s analysis? The complex relations
between discursive language and the embodied experience of learning are discussed
by Perry and Medina where they conclude that:

the experiential body is both a representation of self (a ‘text’) as well as a mode of

creation in progress (a ‘tool’). In addition, embodiment is a state that is contingent
upon the environment and the context of the body. (2011, p. 63)

This proposes that, ideally, a study based on the physicality of musical performance
should involve both first- and third-person perspectives.4 However, the analysis below
has been constrained to a first-person perspective. It is my intention to complement
the rather experimental analysis presented here with a more comprehensive analysis
in a later paper.
Another parameter in the analysis discussed in this paper is transcription. Looking at
how musical form and materials evolve and metamorphose from the very first trans-
lations between sounding music and notation throughout the history of Western clas-
sical music, Luciano Berio concludes that ‘musical transcription, seen from a historical
perspective, implies not only interpretation but also evolutionary and transformational
processes. The practice, the possibilities, and the needs of transcription were an organic
part of musical invention’ (Berio, 2006, p. 35). He continues to argue that a transcrip-
tion can also function as an analysis, and he points to how the third movement in his
Sinfonia ‘is the best and deepest analysis that I could ever have hoped to make of the
Scherzo from Mahler’s second Symphony’ (Berio, 2006, p. 40).
Can one think of the practice of transcribing musical gesture from one form to
another as an analytical act, working mainly beyond language? In the making of Go
To Hell, transcriptions were made from Toccata Orpheus to movement performed
without an instrument, and from this point of learning the choreographies were tran-
scribed to traditional Vietnamese instruments. The transformational possibilities in
the making of a transcription were further tested in the creation of new music and
new choreographies from specific materials found in Riehm’s composition. Further,
from data generated by a motion capture recording of a performance of Toccata
 Contemporary Music Review 485
Orpheus, the movement data were transcribed to a choreography of movements of
light and sound between the 12 offices in the reactor hall in Gerhard Eckel’s installation
Motion Grid, discussed further in Section 4.4. I will, in the following, attempt a perfor-
mer’s analysis that emerges from the experience of performance. Also, I intend to
explore the possibility of using the artistic practice of musical transcription as an
analytical tool.

4.1. A Performer’s Analysis of Toccata Orpheus

Although musical gesture always relates to all dimensions of the performed space, this
analysis draws entirely on interactions in gestural space (Smalley, 2007), defined by the
performer’s bodily interactions with a musical instrument. Hence, in the case of
Toccata Orpheus, the gestural space unfolds around the body and neck of the guitar
and within the reach of arm- and head movements of the performer.
With a gesture-based analysis of the first page of the score, one can observe a signifi-
cant prefix to the first notated action (tapping on the first downbeat with the left
hand). In order to play the first and second actions on the guitar, a preparatory move-
ment is required in order for the right hand to carry out the plucking left of the notes
struck by the left hand on the beat. Such preparation cannot be disassociated from the
first performed note, and will be likely to be carried out with a timing related to the
tempo of the music.
In the first aggregate of three eighth-notes, the third beat requires a rapid shift of
position in the right hand. It is rather demanding to find the correct pitches and,
even more, to make the three notes in high register sound on the guitar when
tapped on the fretboard. Hence, the third beat requires both preparation and extra
attention. The second beat, although marked fff, is rather weak as a sonic event,
since it is constituted by a straight-up lifting of the left hand. As a visual gesture, it
is co-articulated with the following eighth-note, a pluck by the sound-hole. Hence,
what is notated is a lifting of the hand, straight up from the fretboard, but the full
gesture starts with this lifting movement, immediately followed by a swift movement
towards the sound-hole where the left hand plucks the three top strings. These six
actions may represent a first chunk of music. Perhaps the strongest gestural com-
ponent here is the crossing of arms through two identical sequences of movement
from left to right over the fretboard, first carried out by the right hand (on the 2nd
and 3rd eighth-notes) and then in the left hand, as the fourth and fifth action in the
chunk (see further Figure 2).
The next action chunk is longer, starting with a fierce downbeat, a slanting barré
stop, which is forcefully articulated in fff. The second and third beats are co-articulated
as a circular movement where only the initiation is notated in the score. The prepara-
tory movement before the third beat goes in the opposite direction to the notated
lifting of the hand (see Figure 2) and is also the more prominent gestural quality in
this moment. What follows is a gesture which can be performed with more ease: a
series of rasgueados5 alternating positions to the left and the right of the slanting
486 S. Östersjö

Figure 2 Chunking of the first page of Toccata Orpheus. Reproduced with permission from
Edition Ricordi, Berlin.

barré stop fingered by the left hand. The last two rasgueados are performed with both
hands, followed by two loud tapped chords with the right hand and a sharp letting-go
of the initial barré chord. This action, on the beat, is followed by a co-articulated
gesture where the right hand performs a strum and strikes a new barré chord which
is followed by a left hand strum leading up to the first moment where the flow of
eighth-notes is interrupted by a quarter note.
In the notated tempo, the first chunk is approximately three seconds and the second
chunk reaches the quarter note after five seconds, hence they are within the supposed
attention time span. The next chunk is the quarter note alone: it is performed with a
‘vibrato gesture’ where waving the right hand in front of the sound-hole should create
an oscillation of the sound. There are three quarter notes in the first page, and they
have an important structural function.
The fourth chunk has a new rhythmical structure, with 3 + 2 eighth-notes. It takes
off with two plucking actions left to the fingered chord, followed by a plucked note on
the lowest string by the sound-hole. Two eighth-notes then lead up to the second
quarter note, first a right hand chord tapped to the left of the fingered chord, and
finally the left hand performs a co-articulated gesture which starts with a letting-go
 Contemporary Music Review 487
of the fingered chord followed by a strum by the saddle, near the top end of the fret-
board, with the thumb. Again there is an additional, non-notated, movement here.
After the notated release which takes off to the right, the left hand moves swiftly to
the left upper end of the fretboard to perform the strum on the quarter note.
The fifth chunk has the same rhythmical structure, and starts off after the first left
hand strum by first repeating the same action and moving across the fretboard to sul
ponticello position, just by the bridge, for a second strum followed by plucking the two
top strings. The last two notes, tapping with the left hand and a straight-up release of
the right hand chord, are co-articulated with the pluck on strings 1 and 2 and lead up
to the third quarter note gesture. This gesture (discussed above) is marked leichtfussig
which receives no further description anywhere in the performance instructions. This
is the final quarter note in the first page (Figure 3).
The next chunk returns to the 3 + 3 rhythmical pattern where the second group
mirrors the first: L: pluck-strike R: lift (see Figure 4) followed by R: pluck-strike
L: lift (see Figure 5)
Similarly, it is followed by another chunk, 3 + 3 which consists of an alternating
pattern of striking and lifting resulting in a hemiola rhythm of struck notes. The
final chunk is the longest, and it develops logically from the previous ones, first in a
rhythmical configuration of 3 + 3 + 3 with a mirroring pattern between the hands,
continuing the hemiola rhythm, followed by three quarter notes which constitute
the end of the first section of the composition.
What may then be the relation between the above chunking and the strategies at play
in memorising this music? Are there performer’s cues to be found in the same seg-
ments? It is admittedly hard to play this music by heart, but I have done so since
2008 when I performed the piece in the installation discussed above. A particular dif-
ficulty with the composition is how the sequential unfolding of the actions is

Figure 3 The first three actions in the penultimate chunk on page 1. Reproduced with per-
mission from Ludvig Östersjö.
488 S. Östersjö

Figure 4 The final three actions in the penultimate chunk on page 1. Reproduced with per-
mission from Ludvig Östersjö.

completely dependent on the succession of actions being carried out precisely accord-
ing to the score. Each action tends to have far-reaching consequences for the following
ones and, in the entire sequence stretching across the first page over into the first bar of
the second page, each action is interlinked. This paper is not built on a longitudinal
study on memorising procedures, such as in the work devoted to Tania Lisboa’s

Figure 5 A comparison of the analysis of performance of page 1 with and without guitar.
 Contemporary Music Review 489
memorisation of the Bach prelude (Chaffin et al., 2009). However, some observations
can be made through reflections on the process of transcribing the guitar piece to per-
formance without instrument, and memorising that version. First, it is challenging to
perform this music without the resistance and the auditory feedback of the instrument.
Each and every action of the piece, as a musical composition for the guitar, integrates
those two components in every moment. When Fahlin first asked me to perform the
movements without the instrument, I initially found that I had to activate my inner
listening and ‘sonify’ the movements internally, in order to keep track of the structure.
But this was not the only strategy. In the continuing work I also found that the move-
ment sets, when disconnected from the instrument, revealed more overarching pat-
terns. The starting points of these patterns also become performance cues when
performing the piece with the guitar.
Returning to the analysis of action chunks in performance of this piece, the key
moments of these chunks appear to have the same functions as the categories of per-
formance cues discussed by Chaffin et al. (2009). Not only are the action chunks
related to the beginning and ending of movements, they also reflect musical structure,
significant changes in performance techniques and musical gestures that may be inter-
preted as expressive. Hence, the hypothesis may be proposed that the notion of per-
formance cues may be related to the basic properties of chunking by co-articulation.

4.2. A Second Performer’s Analysis

The very first lesson for a musician entering a space to perform a series of choreo-
graphed movements is the way in which you relate to the arena space (Smalley,
2007). If a performance of Toccata Orpheus can be understood mainly from the per-
spective of gestural space, when the same movement sets are performed without the
instrument, these actions are fundamentally related to arena space. Some implications
of this can be identified in a dialogue between the choreographer and myself in the very
first working session when we began to try the idea of performing the gesture without
instrument. While the movements performed on the instruments are defined by the
precise relation to points on the fretboard and the guitar body, here the quality of
the movements emerge from their relation to the body in the space. Hence, the
moments of tension and release in a certain gesture may shift when the resistance of
the instrument is replaced with the relative position of the elbow to the shoulder, or
whether the movement is initiated from the fingers or from the elbow (see Video 3).
In this clip, I was still performing the movements while seated, as if I was about to
play the guitar. However, it was obvious that these choreographies without instrument
invited a different manner of relating to arena space (Smalley, 2007). The relative posi-
tioning of your body in relation to the corners of the space define the energy of your
action. When the choreography from the first page of the score was performed in the
R1 reactor, the two performers first walked down the stairs from the offices, continued
across the pit and made a turn towards the diagonal, stopped in this direction and
immediately initiated the first left hand action.
490 S. Östersjö

Video 3 Workshop with Marie Fahlin in Stockholm, March 2012. Please see the online full
text version to access Video 3, or the video can be accessed via the supplemental material
tab: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2016.1257625.

When the beginning of the piece is performed without instrument, finding this
position demands very little preparation, and hence the first two movements, of
the left and right hand, can be much more separated than in a performance on
the guitar. As discussed above, in the first aggregate of three eighth-notes, the
third beat requires a shift of position in the right hand which demands minute
attention when performed on the guitar. Quite naturally, when performed
without instrument, finding the correct position demands no certain attention
and the third action becomes a much lighter and more immediate gesture. The
second beat, although marked fff, is rather weak also as choreographed movement,
constituted as it is by a straight-up lifting of the left hand, co-articulated with the
following eighth-note by the sound-hole (for a comparison of the two analyses,
see Figure 6).

Figure 6 The circular movement resulting from the right-hand rasgueado.

 Contemporary Music Review 491
The chunking is the same when the music is performed without instrument. The
first is 3 + 3, the second 3 + 3+3 + 3+1. But in the second chunk, some more general
differences in the perception of the gesture material begins to emerge. The ‘rasgueado
section’ is hard to perform without a physical fretboard to hit on either side of the
‘fingered chord’, and the gesture becomes even more co-articulated. Interestingly,
when viewing the motion capture (recorded from a performance on the guitar) of
the second chunk, a circular movement is revealed here, a quality which I had not
perceived when performing the gesture on the instrument (see Video 4). While
the performer’s analysis above relates to this figure as an up-and-down strumming
gesture, a performance without instrument reveals its basic circular movement (see
Figure 6).
The co-articulation at the end of the second chunk remains the same, leading up to
the first quarter note and the ‘vibrato gesture’. A representation of the first two chunks,
visualised according to the performer’s analysis of performance, first with and then
without instrument, may illustrate how the two perspectives may complement each
other (Figure 3). But, perhaps most importantly, from the more overarching represen-
tation of the gestural shapes found in the transcription to movement performed
without instrument, the possibility of creating new music by the articulation of new
sonic materials within the same shapes emerged. The very first test of this method
was the transcriptions we made from visual gesture to performance on a different
instrument, here the instruments played by the two Vietnamese members of the
group The Six Tones: the three performers in Go To Hell (for an example of a combi-
nation of visual gesture and transcription for the Vietnamese zither dàn ̵ tranh, see
Video 5).

Video 4 Excerpt of motion capture of Toccata Orpheus: page 1. Please see the online full
text version to access Video 4, or the video can be accessed via the supplemental material
tab: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2016.1257625.
492 S. Östersjö

Video 5 Excerpt from performance of Go To Hell, choreography from page 1. Please see the
online full text version to access Video 5, or the video can be accessed via the supplemental
material tab: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2016.1257625.

4.3. Transcription Set in Motion

This next series of transcriptions were carried out in two phases. First, I taught the
gesture from Toccata Orpheus to the two Vietnamese performers of the group. In
this phase, they would copy the gesture in performance without instrument. The
second phase was more transformative and involved the making of individual versions
of the choreography adapted for their instruments. The dàn ̵ tranh player Nguyên ̃
Thanh Thủy describes the process in the following way:

It was difficult to copy the movements from the guitar piece. At first I tried to learn
the movements, irrespective of the sounding result on my instrument. Memorising
the gesture became easier when I also began to more intentionally shape the sound-
ing result on the dàn̵ tranh. At this point, the gesture obtained new musical meaning
for me. (personal communication, April 2014)

Video 6 is taken from a teaching session which sits at the borderline between phase one
and two. As can be seen in the clip, the players had not quite memorised the move-
ments yet. Still, after a run through of those bars, the group moves into an exploration
̵ tranh. Nguyên
of how to transcribe the first phrase to the dàn ̃ describes the continued
working process as follows:
I was interested in the hand shapes when the first gesture was played on the guitar
and I was looking for a way to get similar opposite striking positions of the hands.
Stefan on the other hand was more thinking of ways in which the sounding result of
the action could be translated to my instrument. In the first gesture, one hand
excited the right hand side of the strings and the other, the left hand side. He
 Contemporary Music Review 493

Video 6 Excerpt from workshop on transcriptions for Vietnamese instruments. Please see
the online full text version to access Video 6, or the video can be accessed via the sup-
plemental material tab: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2016.1257625.

suggests to play with the two hands on either side of the bridge to give a sounding
representation of the phrase. I remained more concerned with the shape of the
hands in the visual gesture. The way my instrument is held, it is not really possible
to position the hands as on the guitar. After a few minutes of testing, I decided to try
holding my instrument like the guitar instead. (personal communication, April
2014)

The final solution in the transcription did not involve this shift of playing position.
While it gives a very limited idea of how the final transcription did sound, hopefully
this example may indicate the range of compositional choices that are raised in the
making of such a transcription.
However, the possibilities inherent in the practice of transcription, and indeed in the
method discussed above (see Section 4.2) of working from more overarching gestures
as a point of departure in the generation of new musical and choreographic materials,
was the main focus in the making of Go To Hell. Here, the oscillation between ‘reson-
ance’ and ‘resistance’ (Östersjö, 2012) in relation to the affordances of the instruments
was a strong factor. While some materials would translate and allow permutations
easily on one of the traditional instruments, some would afford severe resistance.
These transcriptions eventually resulted in a new version, for trio, of the guitar
piece, which was played in its entirety in a section of the performance. But a greater
part of Go To Hell was made up of the new choreographies, mapping the space of
the nuclear reactor, and musical materials drawn from the guitar piece. A more in-
depth description of these processes would go well beyond the scope of this paper,
but an example of this work can be seen in a section based on a quote from page 8
494 S. Östersjö

Video 7 Excerpt from performance of Go To Hell, starting from excerpt from page 8 of the
score. Please see the online full text version to access Video 7, or the video can be accessed
via the supplemental material tab: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2016.1257625.

of the original score (Video 7). The music was developed in interaction with the chor-
eographer Marie Fahlin, first in sessions at EMS (the Electronic Music Studios) in
Stockholm. Here, we selected specific materials that we had transcribed and worked
rather methodically by improvising variations ‘working by repetition, expansion and
transformation’ (Nguyên ̃ & Östersjö, 2013, p. 88).

4.4. Motion Grid and an Expansion in Space

Around the same time, we also made a motion capture recording of my performance of
the piece at the Humanities Lab at Lund University. The generation of this motion
capture involved many days of hard labour, since we decided to capture every detail
of finger movement in the choreography of the composition. We recorded high speed
video footage in addition to the motion capture, and the data were manually conflated
by Carolina Larsson at the Humanities Lab. The primary intention was to use the data
for the generation of both a sound and light installation, by the Austrian composer
Gerhard Eckel. Here, the movement data were transcribed to a choreography of move-
ments of light and sound between the 12 offices in the reactor hall, taking these move-
ments carried out in gestural space and projecting them into arena space, both sonically
and visually. Gerhard Eckel describes the working process in the following way:

While developing Motion Grid I was searching for ways of augmenting the inti-
mate choreography of the guitarist’s fingers and hands and transposing it into
the vast performance space. The work is based on experiences I gained in the
artistic research project Embodied Generative Music,6 which enabled dance
 Contemporary Music Review 495
performers to play virtual instruments through their body movements motion-
captured in real-time. Motion-capture algorithms use skeleton models and
inverse kinematics to estimate joint positions and angles from the 3D positions
of visual markers attached to the body. In Motion Grid I used these joint positions
to control the sound synthesis and the light projectors. From the joint positions I
calculated the speeds of the five fingers relative to their hand and the speed of the
hand relative to its elbow, resulting into 6 values per hand. Each speed was then
assigned to one of the 12 office spaces containing a loudspeaker and light projec-
tor. The speeds were transposed into light intensities using a function adapting the
speed variations to the way incandescent bulbs react to electrical dimming, which
is not straightforward. For the sound a more intricate solution was needed due to
the extremely reverberant acoustics of the performance space. The speeds were
transposed into sequences of impulses with varying density using a sound
model based on the stick-slip phenomenon, which is the spontaneous jerking
motion that can occur while two objects are sliding over each other. Stick-slip
processes are at work when doors creak or strings are bowed. So the fingers
and hands of the guitarist become giant creaking door hinges, the intensities of
which are controlled by the performers opening and closing the office doors.
Low speeds create easily localisable individual sharp impulses whereas high
speeds result in intense quasi-periodic, almost pitched, sustained sounds. The
12 independent stick-slip processes result into a complex spatial sonic texture
inscribing the choreography of the guitarist’s hands and fingers into the architec-
tural and acoustic structure of the performance site. (personal communication,
May 2016)

At the structural culmination of the 50-minute performance, the sound of Gerhard

Eckel’s installation and a choreography for two performers were brought together

Video 8 Excerpt from performance of Go To Hell, including Gerhard Eckel’s Motion Grid.
Please see the online full text version to access Video 8, or the video can be accessed via the
supplemental material tab: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2016.1257625.
496 S. Östersjö
with the original motion capture of Toccata Orpheus, projected onto the wall opposite
the offices. This section, it seems to me, captures something essential in the intentions
with these multiple interpretative layers growing out of the original guitar piece that
constitute Go To Hell (Video 8).

5. Conclusions
This paper proposes a number of ways in which the knowledge which resides in the
musical body can inform and indeed also transform musical practice. It can inform
our analytical understanding of musical materials in performance. It can transform
our conception of deeply grounded social practices, such as the concert hall tradition
and the concept of musical composition as a practice of writing and inscription. A
number of preliminary attempts have been made at identifying models for an embo-
died approach to music analysis by way of the concepts of chunking by co-articula-
tion (Godøy et al., 2010), and by the introduction of Smalley’s discussion of
performed space into an analysis of musical gesture in performance. Clearly, the
modest attempts carried out above may only suggest that further work needs to
be done in order to evaluate the potential of the notion of an embodied analysis
of musical creativity. By way of transcriptions across different media, embodied
and material understandings of the gesture material in Toccata Orpheus were
created. The composition itself can be analysed as a structure of gestural-sonic
objects (Östersjö, 2008) but the development of new music and choreographies
from the material in the score in the making of Go To Hell suggests further possi-
bilities in such compositional strategies. The proposition of a gesture-based compo-
sitional practice calls for further experimentation and analysis, at the intersection
between artistic research, computational approaches to music perception and sys-
tematic musicology. Such an endeavour may also shed further light on the possibi-
lities for a radicalisation of musical practice through interactions between artistic
creativity and other fields of knowledge production.

Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Funding
This was work was supported by the Swedish Research Council (VR) Grant number 2011-2282 and
by the Orpheus Institute, Belgium.

Supplemental Data
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07494467.2016.
1257625.
 Contemporary Music Review 497
Notes
[1] The term was coined by the psychologist James Gibson and first presented in his book The eco-
logical approach to visual perception (1986). In Gibson’s theory of the perceptual system, cogni-
tion is the result of the active involvement of a human being. A given object affords different
things to different perceiving organisms: for instance, a lake may afford swimming to a human
while affording support for a bug. But this is equally true (and more interesting) on a finer-
grained level: a musical instrument affords different musical possibilities to different perfor-
mers, hence, the affordances of a violin are as dependent on the individual performer as on
the acoustic properties of the instrument.
[2] The video examples are found on www.thesixtones.net.
[3] Godøy and Jensenius suggest a typology of four fundamental categories: sound-producing,
sound-facilitating, communicate, and sound-accompanying gesture (Godøy & Leman,
2010).
[4] For a recent discussion of such method development, see Leman (2010) and Coorevits, Moe-
lants, Östersjö, and Gorton (2015).
[5] Rasgueado is a playing technique originating from the Spanish flamenco guitar and consists of
attacks with the right hand on the strings moving ‘forward’ (towards the strings) rather than
‘backwards’, as in a normal pluck.
[6] http://egm.kug.ac.at.

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