Les gestes de la musique ancienne dans les textes et l’iconographie

Abstract

This article studies how gestures used in the past to play musical instruments can be reconstructed with the help of textual and visual sources. It examines on the one hand the way sources can be used to find out about the gestures made by musicians in the past, and on the other hand, how gestures were represented in art works and texts. The first part of the article deals with the violin in the early modern period. Researchers use separate sources, first didactic handbooks, without any illustrations, secondly art works representing violin players. In this case, the information retrieved from books can be supplemented by the art works. The second part deals with the nineteenth century and a later instrument, the clarinet. The case is different, as didactic manuals were now illustrated and the invention of the instrument left traces in patents that explained how to play the clarinet, via images and text. In this way, we are able to give a survey of relations between gestures, texts and images, over four centuries in the domain of musical interpretation. The earlier period emphasises technicity, whereas the later period is the locus of social as well as technical conflicts. The article also considers how musicians were likely to learn how to play by observing the gestures made by performers, and so focuses on actual practice alongside literary and artistic representation.

Keywords

• gesture
• technicity
• music
• violin
• clarinet
• treatise