The role that gesture plays in acousmatic music has been well documented. Even when we are unable to see how sounds are made, traces of their production persist. Moreover, extracting these clues appears to be a natural, and perhaps even inevitable, part of the listening experience. In this piece I wanted to explore the idea of developing musical identities based on three different gesture types: animate, inanimate and mechanical. Animate gesture refers to a sense of human presence and effort in the unfolding events. In the case of inanimate gesture, events are shaped by the natural laws of physics. Examples include a bouncing ball or chimes as they collide against one another. Mechanical gestures—stutters, delays, glitches—might be characterized by a level of precision that is not found in the other non-mechanical behaviors. The source sounds in this work were chosen with these gestural qualities in mind, but the gesture types also serve as a model for the organization of sounds. All three gesture types are present throughout the work, but shifting focus gives rise to formal divisions characterized by emphasis on one type over the others. Gestenformen was composed at the Hoschule für Musik ünd Theatre in Hamburg. Much of my time was spent experimenting with the wave field synthesis system, and alas, by the end of my week-long stay I had only managed to assemble a portion of the work. As such, you might think of this as a sketch, with a fully realized work soon to follow.
