The gestures that accompany improvisation in Indian vocal music, like the gestures that accompany speech, are closely co-ordinated with vocalization. Though linked to what is being sung, these movements are not determined by vocal action; nor are they taught explicitly, deliberately rehearsed, or tied to specific meanings. Students tend to gesture recognizably like their teachers, producing lineage-based gesture dialects, but the gestural repertoire of every vocalist is nonetheless idiosyncratic. This paper aims to trace a brief history of song gesture in India, and to show some of the links between gesture and vocalization. It also adapts Katharine Young's theory of the "family body" to the transmission of gesture dialects through teaching lineages. Gesture and sound are taken to be parallel channels for the expression of melody.The body and the voice work together in music as well as in speech. Flamenco singers, for example, heighten the rhetorical impact of their performance with dramatic movements of the hands, arms, and eyes. Singers of Peking Opera assume stylized gestural dispositions according to specific role types. Systems of chironomy are an integral part of Yemenite Torah recitation (Katsman, 2007) and are found in other liturgical chant traditions as well.Indian classical vocalists use gesture space together with sonic space as a medium for the depiction of improvised 1 melody. Vocal forms such as dhrupad, khyal, and thumri in the North, and ragam-tanam-pallavi in the South feature highly cultivated vocal improvisation practices that give rise to ever-novel melodic utterances. These improvisation techniques are guided by flexible frameworks that operate like grammatical structures. In this sense, the melodic improvisation that occurs in the course of performance is akin to extemporaneous speech.The gestures that accompany this vocal improvisation (hereafter song gesture), like those of improvised speech (hereafter speech gesture), are closely co-ordinated
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