The only people who can hook onto this are people who have heard the music and are able to understand that Egregious is tongue-in-cheek and are willing to take the association with New Complexity, itself a contentious and problematic lumping, with a grain of salt and also understand that the postmodern/modern distinction is still anything but a stable distinction. The number of people from 'outside' who are thoroughly misled by the article will vastly outnumber the ones who are enlightened by it, I'm afraid.

I don't envy the author's task!

...(keep taking the tablature)...

Best,

Alistair

No; it was once on Wikipedia and is therefore GOS(h)PEL TRUTH.

I am also annoyed by the Wikipedia entry, not because it will damage any reputations or cause any serious misunderstandings in the long run, but because it distracts from the serious component of this thread.

But since no one here wants to take credit for the article, I guess we could just try to ignore it rather than lambast the author in apparent absentia.

I'm not sure how relevant this is, but "gesture" is a concept often evoked in interpretation of baroque music.  Perhaps it's only a metaphor for something purely auditory - a way sound and phrases can sweep, maybe - but it certainly has its origins in very specific physical movements.  I don't really know enough about it to comment further - and perhaps it doesn't belong on this thread anyway, maybe I've misunderstood? ...just thought I'd step in with a defense of the concept of gesture... retreats to corner mumbling to self...

I think the word 'gesture' can be more confusing than we contemporary-music types realise (I remember George querying its precise meaning a few months back) and just thought it might be worth clarifying for Reiner et al that it really does just mean something like 'the shape of a phrase/figure'. It becomes particularly useful, I think, in discussing/analysing post-tonal music, since it allows you to get round awkward and no-longer-entirely-relevant questions such as 'Is that a "phrase" or a "motif"?', and also because it can apply to a sequence of musical actions characterised by rhythm, timbre or by some other parameter other than pitch.

However, this also leads me to another point. I wonder if we shouldn't be more careful to distinguish between gesture in the above sense (which is based on an analogy between the way a piece of music moves and the way a human being moves) and gesture in the more literal sense of the actions a performer carries out in order to produce a sound. We're so used to using 'gesture' to refer to a gesture made by the music, that is, that we risk forgetting that 'gesture' also has a much less metaphorical sense which is also relevant to the production of sound. And once we start discussing music in which the means of sound production are a signifying part of the result, then we have both senses of the word at play.

Or is that distinction already part of what you're trying to draw attention to, CD?

In this context, I think gesture refers simply to the physical action that produces a sound. But in the sense that t-i-n presents it, which is very common when talking about new music, it is interesting because it gives a certain importance to contour, as well as rhythm, which are arguably the defining attributes of a gesture.