Gestural migration as a pedagogical tool in violin learning: a case study

ABSTRACT This article explores the potential of gestural migrations as a novel approach to violin pedagogy, allowing us to trace enlightening parallelisms between the learning of musical performative gestures and the gestural dimension of cinema as a time-shaped/shaping artistic discipline. As a case study, I take the first movement of Claude Debussy's Violin Sonata L. 140, composed in 1917, following an empirically grounded quantitative analytical approach. I attempt to trace gestural correspondences with selected scenes from the contemporary French cinematic movement that fascinated the composer in the early years of the twentieth century.