Body, mimesis and image : a gesture based approach to interpretation in contemporary guitar performing practice

This thesis addresses interpretative issues arising from notated music, particularly recent guitar music typifying progressive notational and aesthetic trends, from a perspective based on the concepts of mimesis and gesture. Drawing on Adorno’s theory of musical reproduction, scholarship on musical gesture and recent models of performers’ relationship to notation, I propose interpretative strategies aiming at the vindication of the role of the body in the discussion of musical works, while also examining the performing conventions challenged by recent developments in guitar notation. Artistic practice is fundamental to this thesis as it accounts for the exploration of various interpretative strategies and choices derived from the application of the aforementioned concepts. An accompanying folio of videos and recordings documents the impact of these theoretical concepts upon my performing practice. The starting point is a discussion of the performing issues of Brian Ferneyhough’s Kurze Schatten II, a peak of complexity in the guitar literature, and the relationship between musical gesture and the metaphorical domains to which this work alludes. Subsequently, the interpretative strategies proposed here are applied to aesthetic models differing from that of Ferneyhough as well as to music appealing to multi-parametric notation – here considered as a strand deriving from Ferneyhough’s aesthetics – requiring a paradigm shift in its interpretative approach.