Abstract
Music is neither a construction of pitches nor a linear arrangement of vocal parts, but rather an energetic shaping through time that integrates articulation, harmony, melody, and rhythm. Music expresses a kind of gesture in the dimension of sounds. In most cases, musical expressions, compared to linguistic expressions, are more like a state of motion or a behavior of sounds originating from physical sensations. Musical gesture can interpret the emotional expression and meaning of music from a perspective that is closer to the nature of music. Such an interpretation is not constrained by the traditional analysis of form and content, self-discipline and heteronomy, subjectivity and objectivity. It is more about how to stimulate the sensory systems to join in and understand the behavior and contents of music expressions in order to synthesize the meaning of music in different dimensions.
About the author
Hao Ding (b. 1976) is Associate Professor of Music at Nanjing Normal University, specializing in piano playing, music analysis, and Western musical history. She was 2012–2013 visiting scholar at Yale University Department of Music. Her publications include The origin and formation of the classical sonata (2009), On touch technique of piano playing (2019), “On the semantic analysis of musical gesture” (2018). Her articles have appeared in a wide range of music journals.
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