Adjusting to the Other: Audiencing Through Gesture in Karnatak Vocal Lessons

In addition to their pedagogic dimensions, music lessons are contexts for performing and audiencing. This article focuses on performance-audiency interactions in Karnatak vocal lessons in South India, exploring how teachers and students audience each other. Drawing on work from phenomenological and pragmatist traditions, I analyse ways that gesture, gaze and utterance contribute to teachers’ and students’ grip over their interactions, both with the other person and with the music performed. Through this analysis I develop the concept of audiency as an active and embodied ‘adjustment to the other’, and aim to further understanding of music as interaction.