ABSTRACT

The recurrence of gestural patterns has even been observed in different musical contexts. This chapter discusses the results of a case study, which draws attention to the effect of auditory cues yielded by leaders on the gestural response of followers in ensemble performances. It focuses on the different gestural responses produced by musicians while following their own and others' recordings. The musical relevance of regions where gestural consistency was observed in solo performances suggests that the temporal energy allocation of movement may be related to internal representations of expressive intentions. A higher variability of energy curves, observed at the end of the excerpt, indicated that the participants tended to move with less consistency in comparison to other parts of the score. When musicians play in ensembles, they face a complex task, which is to align their individual performance choices to those of the co-performers.