The role of gesture and movement is evident in the work of an artist, dancer or musician, who transmits his skills in oral tradition. In western academic music, the expressiveness of the body gradually acquires an important role in the works of modern composers. The subject of this article touches the indirect connections of music and gesture, music and corporality, which are not yet sufficiently developed in Russian musicology. Meanwhile, these problems are situated in the center of artistic search for a number of major contemporary authors, which may give rise to new aesthetics that are created at the intersection of disciplines and require a review of methods for their analysis.
The first part of the publication is devoted to the background of this issue: how has the attitude of composers to the bodily presence of a person in a musical work changed over the past century? It is possible to distinguish several stages of a such process of integration of these two different elements: from the idea of «mechanical man» in compositions of the early twentieth century to the complete dissociation and even opposition of man and the technical tool created by himself at the end of this period. An overview of this issue in the context of today's situation is described afterwards.
In the second part, there is example of the work of the famous Belgian artist Thierry De Mey, which helps to examine the interaction of music and gesture in the process of writing a play, as well as the integration of modern technology tools, by which composers review the place of the body in sound space, expanding the palette of expressive means and leaving beyond the field of musical art. The article also suggests reflections on the topic of the emergence of new theoretical disciplines at the intersection of sciences (anthrophony, musical informatics, musical cognitive science, gesture studies) and introduces new terms of modern musicology, such as multimodality, intermediality.
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