A Theory of Virtual Agency for Western Art Music (Musical Meaning and Interpretation) - Softcover

Hatten, Robert S.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0253037980 ISBN 13: 9780253037985

Publisher: Indiana University Press, 2018

Synopsis

In his third volume on musical expressive meaning, Robert S. Hatten examines virtual agency in music from the perspectives of movement, gesture, embodiment, topics, tropes, emotion, narrativity, and performance. Distinguished from the actual agency of composers and performers, whose intentional actions either create music as notated or manifest music as significant sound, virtual agency is inferred from the implied actions of those sounds, as they move and reveal tendencies within music-stylistic contexts. From our most basic attributions of sources for perceived energies in music, to the highest realm of our engagement with musical subjectivity, Hatten explains how virtual agents arose as distinct from actual ones, how unspecified actants can take on characteristics of (virtual) human agents, and how virtual agents assume various actorial roles. Along the way, Hatten demonstrates some of the musical means by which composers and performers from different historical eras have staged and projected various levels of virtual agency, engaging listeners imaginatively and interactively within the expressive realms of their virtual and fictional musical worlds.

About this title

About the Author

Robert S. Hatten is Marlene and Morton Meyerson Professor in Music at The University of Texas at Austin and President of the Society for Music Theory. He is the author of Musical Meaning in Beethoven: Markedness, Correlation, and Interpretation and Interpreting Musical Gestures, Topics, and Tropes: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

A Theory of Virtual Agency for Western Art Music

By Robert S. Hatten

Indiana University Press

Copyright © 2018 Robert S. Hatten
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-253-03798-5

Contents

Acknowledgments, ix, 
Introduction, 1, 
PRELUDE: From Gesture to Virtual Agency, 15, 
1. Foundations for a Theory of Agency, 31, 
2. Virtual Environmental Forces and Gestural Energies: Actants as Agential, 47, 
3. Virtual Embodiment: From Actants to Virtual Human Agents, 65, 
4. Virtual Identity and Actorial Continuity, 84, 
INTERLUDE I: From Embodiment to Subjectivity, 133, 
5. Staging Virtual Subjectivity, 139, 
6. Virtual Subjectivity and Aesthetically Warranted Emotions, 178, 
7. Staging Virtual Narrative Agency, 202, 
8. Performing Agency, 219, 
9. An Integrative Agential Interpretation of Chopin's Ballade in F Minor, Op. 52, 244, 
INTERLUDE II: Hearing Agency: A Complex Cognitive Task, 261, 
10. Other Perspectives on Virtual Agency, 267, 
Postlude, 284, 
References, 293, 
Index of Names and Works, 313, 
Index of Concepts, 319, 

CHAPTER 1

Foundations for a Theory of Agency

The primary locus of agency for human perception and cognition is the reconstructed source of a perceived expenditure of energy. Agency is most relevant for humans and other sentient beings when that source can be understood as concentrated in an individual or entity responsible for a motivated expenditure of energy. When agency is not immediately apparent to the senses, more than one inference may be required. For example, the movement of the wind is so diffusely motivated that it is generally not practical to ascribe agency to a singular source. We make exceptions for localized winds emanating from the action of a fan (for which wind is the primary function) or a jet engine (for which wind is a secondary consequence of propulsion). Earlier human cultures, however, gave individual agency to the diffuse natural winds that we experience when outdoors. The ancient Greeks invoked a supernatural individual (Aeolus, the god of wind) to personify that agency. Today, weather reporters typically invoke the causal agency of a meteorological entity (e.g., a cold front) to help explain the source of a prevailing wind. These examples suggest that the agents we infer need not be actual, living individuals, but they can also be conceived as virtual constructions, whether in the form of a god (Aeolus) or in the shape of a theoretical entity (a cold front) that stands for an actual, proximal cause.

It is also possible to assume a placeholder for potential agency in the absence of sufficient clues (or interpretive imagination), whereby we neutrally assume a source without constructing a particular or individual agency for it. I call this unspecified source of energy an actant. When a given force is presumed, for whatever reason, to have an unspecified but concentrated motivating source, that force is considered an action. Defined in this way, actions and actants are mutually implicative — you cannot have one without the other.

A given force may also have a given direction. If both source and direction are fully explicable by one or more physical or mechanical causes not directly involving an individual intention, we remain at the level of the actant. Ascribing human agency occurs only when there is evidence that the action could be willed, or intended, at some point in the chain of causes and effects. For example, an internal combustion engine causes a car to move in the direction that its wheels are pointed. The engine is individualized (a particular engine) but not intentional. For intention we require a human agent who starts the engine and applies the gas. Thus, the actions of a car have not simply causes but actants, and in this case one of the actants is also an intending agent (the driver).

Energetic shaping through time (Hatten 2004, 109) may also provide evidence of human agency, especially if we add the criterion "interpretable as significant" — in other words, intelligible, and perhaps intelligent, with respect to some intention, whether or not the presumed gesturing agent is consciously aware of that intent. Thus, degree of conscious intent on the part of an agent is subject to interpretation, ranging from witting to unwitting communication or signification.

Agency may be transferred along the lines of transmission of a corresponding energy. We tend to ascribe agency to an immediate, individual force, especially in cases where the ultimate source of the force may be diffuse. Thus, semiotically speaking, I would not typically say that the force of gravity caused an object to strike my head but rather that an apple falling from a tree hit me, taking the convenient shortcut that relegates the source to the closest impinging individual actant (that is why we consider Newton's inference of an underlying physical force to be so remarkable). However, if the source agency is obviously an individual, especially a sentient one, and readily observable, we generally have no trouble moving back up the chain of causes and effects in understanding that source as being the responsible agent. Suppose we are watching a game of pool: a player sends energy through the cue stick, which transmits it to a cue ball, which transmits it to another ball, which may produce an intended result. Although the immediate action propelling a struck ball may be traced to the energy transmitted through the cue ball, the chain of energy transmission is easily traced perceptually to an original, individual motivating force, and thus we consider the player as the intentional agent, just as we saw the driver as the intentional agent moving the car in my earlier example. For humans, then, semiotic attribution of agency typically involves a sentient being that may set into action various tools (such as a cue stick in billiards) or intermediaries in order to attempt and possibly achieve an ascertainable result.

The ascription of subjective agency, as opposed to brute or objective cause and effect, is typical of animals as well as humans; in reacting to energy expenditures of an unknown source as though from other sentient beings (potentially threatening, in the case of predators), we also localize and attempt to identify the source of those forces that may have an impact on our survival. Here, gestalt laws of pattern completion and good continuation serve to stitch together fragmentary perceptions into functionally coherent individuals moving intentionally (e.g., from glimpses of a striped pattern moving through the tall grass we may interpret a stalking tiger). When, however, humans ascribe agency to energetic shapes, such as gestures (or music) that they know to have been produced by other humans, the ascription of performative agency is even more compelling, whether or not the energetic shapes are seen or heard in close proximity to their producer. Such inferred, intentional agency tends to persist, to have identity across time and change, whether the inferred agent is active or passive (i.e., interpreted as producer or receiver of energy).

Table 1.1 summarizes these and other means by which we move from objective, physical inferences to subjective, agential inferences with respect to the source, connection, force, and continuity of energies as perceived and experienced in the world.

These basic principles of attributing agency also apply to our understanding of music, as table 1.2 displays. Even when speaking of a disembodied musical gesture, a sonic energetic shaping through time that we may hear without an observed source, we generally assume an actual human agency comprising one or more performers who have provided the physical energy and intention required to produce the act we call a musical gesture in sound. Why should that be, when we know that machines may also reproduce notated sounds synthetically without human performance? Generally, we hear subtle cues in recordings that signify both the more flexible realizations of human gestures (i.e., lacking strict mathematical proportionality) and the expressive potential of such irregularities (i.e., coordinated with significant aspects of musical organization). Mechanical intervention — whether by means of impressions on a piano roll that are then sonically realized on a player piano or through digitalization and reproduction on a Bösendorfer Synclavier — often reproduces enough human nuance to enable a listener to infer a human performer (even one long deceased, as in the case of the Synclavier's digitalized realization in sound of piano rolls made by George Gershwin).

In the case of a purely mechanical realization of a score (i.e., mechanical production from notation through a midi interface), we may nevertheless assume agency, if not in the performance, then in the composition itself — the creative agency of the composer who fashioned the score. However, if the score is the result of an algorithm, as in David Cope's (2001) fascinating computer programs that emulate musical styles in their generative capacities, we will perhaps be fooled in our ascription of composer agency. If we are knowledgeable enough, though, we may move still further up the chain of agency to Cope himself as the intentional agent configuring the algorithms that guide the sonic output that simulates a composer's musical style. Even more problematically, however, the actual agencies of performer and composer may coexist, or merge, as in the case of improvisation, when the performer takes on a somewhat compositional or creative role.

I have noted some of the subtle cognitive and semiotic bases for attributions of actual agents, even when not physically present as part of a perceived action. Here, I develop the idea that we have adapted these evolutionarily refined capacities to infer not only once-removed actual agents (such as performers or composers) but also virtual agents that may only be implied by composed (notated) or performed (sonically realized) musical gestures. "Virtual" in this context means any actant or human agent (or actor or subjectivity) that can be inferred as producing intentional musical actions (gestures and the like), reacting to implied forces or other agents, revealing intentions, and experiencing thoughts and emotions. I suggest that this capacity to infer or construct virtual agencies as implied by the music's own events need not result in the intentional fallacy of attributing every expressive effect in a musical work to the expression of a composer or a performer (which are clearly the first defaults in interpretation, and thus not so much fallacies as predictable human responses). Virtual agency provides a more neutral playing field for the composer, who is freed from the direct responsibility of being the individual who is feeling the emotions expressed by various virtual agents. Instead, the composer may fabricate a virtual world in which virtual agents take that responsibility. And a performer may reanimate that world by manifesting it in sound, by actually embodying those forces and intentions implied by virtual musical agents.

To restate this point, we employ many of the same perceptual mechanisms and cognitive strategies to ascribe virtual agencies in composed or artistic worlds as we do to ascribe agency in the everyday world. Productive forces within a musical work may therefore be interpreted, along the lines of our experience in the natural world, as either diffuse or individual, as sentient or not, and as humanly intentional or not. For example, if a composer creates an undulating contour to suggest waves, the resulting sonic shape may simply imply a diffuse physical source within the virtual realm of the musical work. But just as one may ascribe supernatural agency to wind, one may ascribe an external agency to these musically simulated waves (perhaps at first defaulting to a generalized Nature as a hypostatized natural source of energy). The agitation of those waves may then suggest the agitation of a virtual human agent. Finally, through a similar process by which we infer emotion from movement (i.e., movement as implying agency and the character of that movement implying the emotive state of that agent), we may arrive at an interpretation of a natural wave force as personified. We thereby move beyond generalized Nature, applying agency to a specific individual (e.g., an angry god) or to a more specified force (e.g., the restlessness of Fate). The agency implied by a musical gesture need not always be a virtual human one, but it will likely be interpreted in human terms, in the sense that we will attribute intentionality to the source and an emotional charge to its forceful manifestation.

Musical Gesture, Emotion, and Agency

I have defined musical gesture as energetic shaping through time that is understood as both affective and significant (Hatten 2004, 125). Affect (emotion) and significance (meaning) are inextricably woven into any human gesture, creating what I consider to be an emergent expressive meaning. In music, however, human gestures must be negotiated with harmony, melody, motive, meter, and other relevant stylistic elements. Even Béla Bartók's negative cadences, in which he slides downward in a nontempered glissando gesture of rejection, typically begin from a pitch that is included in the tempered set of twelve pitch classes. Thus, any interpretation of expressive meaning must take into account the semiotic contribution of all the elements integrated into a given musical gesture.

For example, the opening motto of Ludwig van Beethoven's Piano Sonata in E? op. 81a (Das Lebewohl), features a gestural stepwise descent that by itself might suggest a prolonged sigh (example 1.1). But the topical reference is that of horn fifths, and the symbolic significance of the figure is that of distant longing (in music iconography, the horn call in the Romantic forest), evoking emotions such as regret in the face of absence (Rosen 1995, 117). Harmonic implication in the two-voiced horn-fifth gesture is the relatively closed progression I–V–I with the relatively closed trajectory of stable-unstable-stable. Its motto-like concision contributes to its symbolic significance as an emblem, foregrounded and succinct. The figure appears as it would on the natural horn, in the major mode; thus, its use here might seem to contradict the warranted expression of sadness when facing the departure of a friend (note the text setting of "Le-be-wohl" ("fare-thee-well" would be an approximation in English). However, the undercutting insertion of C in the bass turns the I6 harmony into a deceptive vi chord, and the sudden swerve to a minor submediant in place of a major tonic enacts an expression of poignancy that is like a sudden stab of sadness — a staged moment of dramatic recognition that expresses an emotion rather than merely evoking a mood.

But whose gesture is this? Is the virtual agent also the creative agent (here, Beethoven) hiding behind a mask as a persona? In such an interpretation, we might identify emotionally with Beethoven, and through the representation or expression of his presumed sadness, we might experience our own sadness. But we could also interpret the horn call as being produced by an unidentified, more purely virtual agent in a distant, virtual location; the emotion we feel might then be in reaction to that virtual agent's (perhaps unwitting) act in producing this sonic symbol from afar, which we might further interpret as having the significance of an oracular utterance. Furthermore, we might share some sense of empathy with the virtual utterer of this horn call — not unlike the protagonist at the end of Franz Schubert's Winterreise who empathizes with a blind hurdygurdy player and appropriates his song as emblematic of the protagonist's own grief. This leads to a central question: Where might we locate the agency of our own emotional responses to musical gestures?

The very question highlights the interdependency of agency, gesture, and emotion. Figure 1.1 offers a preliminary model of these relationships. Once a virtual agent is embodied by the music and given subjective identity in the musical discourse, that identity may be understood as actively producing (as immediate agent) some gesture or, alternatively, as receiving (as immediate patient, or better, recipient of) the energy of a musical gesture — and perhaps also actively engaging with another agent, depending on the context. If we interpret the virtual agent as receiving the gesture, then another human agent or source (whether natural or mechanical) must be inferred as having produced the gesture received. Furthermore, the recipient role presupposes the prior establishment of an already stable agential identity that, like a human character or human being, may be understood as persevering across considerable change in expressive gesture. The listener, at least in the case of Romantic music, will tend to identify with a central virtual agent who apparently both produces and receives — both acts and is acted on. I call the agent or character with which we tend to identify the principal internal agent (which takes on an actorial role in the current theory), and I call any agency that acts on the internal agent (also actorial, in the current theory) an external agent (Hatten 2004, 225). Internal-external here refers to the perspective of that agent with which we identify, but both are within the virtual-fictive world of the musical discourse.

If gestures are the means by which we infer agency, how do we infer a singular internal agency across the variety of gestures that may be understood as either produced or received? I address this question in the following chapters, giving special attention to the means by which a virtual agent/actor's identity and its persistence are staged (chap. 4). In addition, I also explore shared subjectivity (Hatten 2004, 231–32), first through our identification with an inferred virtual agent and then through the coherent integration of more than one virtual agent or actor into a single virtual subjectivity (chap. 5-6).

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0253037980
• ISBN 13: 9780253037985
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 334