GESTURE AND SOUND IN THE LATE ROMANTIC PIANO REPERTOIRE

Abstract

The late Romantic piano repertoire demands extreme dynamic, textural, and emotional expression from performers, often eliciting expansive physical gestures that extend far beyond the keyboard. Yet the relationship between these visible movements and the resulting acoustic output has received little systematic investigation. This study examined how specific gestural patterns in late Romantic piano playing influence both sonic parameters and listener perception. Six professional pianists performed excerpts from Scriabin and Rachmaninoff while three-dimensional motion capture and electromyography recorded their upper body movements. Eighty listeners then rated congruent and incongruent gesture-sound pairings on semantic differential scales. Results revealed that late Romantic performance involved significantly larger ranges of motion in the thoracic spine and shoulders compared to Classical repertoire, with gestural onsets preceding acoustic events by an average of 180 milliseconds. Listeners exposed to congruent gesture-sound pairings rated performances substantially higher on emotional expressiveness, tone color, and phrasing quality than those viewing mismatched pairings, despite identical audio. Three recurrent gestural archetypes were identified the ascending release, the weighted fall, and the suspended breath each producing distinct acoustic or perceptual effects. These findings demonstrate that gesture in late Romantic piano performance is not ancillary but causal, actively shaping both sound production and audience interpretation through cross-modal integration. The study concludes that gesture and sound form an indivisible expressive system, with direct implications for performance pedagogy and the aesthetics of pianism.