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 on 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 the understanding of music as interaction.