Gesture

Let me call attention to this video  of the late South Indian vocalist K.V. Narayanaswamy.  I believe that I've praised KVN (as he was known) in these parts before, as quite possibly the finest musician I've ever heard live (at the very least, on a short list with Carlos Kleiber.*)  If you're not familiar with Karnatic music, just pay attention to the small details, the gamakas or ornaments in the melodic line, which are functional within each Raga, so that the movement between particular tones in the mode is associated with particular gamakas, which can involve oscillations between tones. slides to and from tones, and subtle intonation. KVN executes these beautifully, but even more, he projects these with elegant hand gestures (start around 17:30 for some of the most expressive movements), which are too individual and intuitive to be considered systematic or formal in any way, but yet so consistent and clear within his own performances to be thought of as merely casual.  The music, indeed all South Indian music, has a strong extemporized component, but the relationship of voice to hand here is not impromptu, but integral to a powerfully worked-out and complex rhetorical art that is also and immediately expressive.

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* As long as we're talking elegant gestures, if you don't know the black and white pit footage of Kleiber conducting Tristan in  Bayreuth in the early '70s, you definitely ought to.  Kleiber uses his whole body in a way that ought to be extravagant, but he's performing to an audience who cannot see him, and in many viewings, I've increasingly become convinced that not a single gesture or movement is wasted.  Ecstatic, yes, extravagant, no.