This book offers a groundbreaking introduction to the role of gestures in music, tailored for educators working with young students before university level. Written in clear, intuitive language and free from mathematical or musical prerequisites, this book makes complex ideas accessible.

Drawing from Guerino Mazzola’s influential work The Topos of Music, this volume presents gesture theory in a uniquely approachable way, richly illustrated with high-quality figures. It introduces the revolutionary concept of hypergestures — gestures within spaces of gestures — opening new possibilities for understanding and teaching complex musical interactions.

Preface

The idea to write this book was first proposed by Jasmin with some of her colleagues at the end of Mazzola’s courses on gesture and performance theory.

The philosophy of such a book is an educational approach to fundamental topics defining music. Music is view ed as a symbolic entity, typically presented by a score, together with its performative transformation to physical reality of sounds and their creative mechanical or electronic instruments.

This book first develops the music theory of symbolic entities and correlations and then introduces the modes of describing and understanding performance. We propose these approaches in the new language of musical gestures, a methodology that strongly respects the first approach to music for young students.

A third part of the book sketches the challenging pedagogical dimension of teaching music in this elementary spirit.

The co-authors are all my students and will guarantee that the language and methods as displayed here can be digested without higher scientific perspectives. I am in particular grateful for Jasmin’s, Mica’s, and Ryan’s intense interaction along with the book’s creation. Thanks from their teacher’s, Guerino Mazzola’s, part.

We are pleased to acknowledge the support from Springer’s science editor Francesca Bonadei for writing such a demanding treatise.

Minneapolis, September 2025