A Theory of Virtual Agency for Western Art Music

Robert S. Hatten

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780253038012
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music Theory & Appreciation

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.

Interlude I: From Embodiment to Subjectivity

Having established the potential of virtual actants to combine into agents and actorial roles in chapter 4, I turn in chapter 5 to the consideration of actorial agents as interiorized threads of thought in a larger, virtual subjectivity. For this interiorization to take place, the interpreter must have some means to move from more literal (or imagined) kinds of embodiment, as theorized by Arnie Cox (2016) and as discussed in chapter 3. Virtual subjectivity is not so much embodied as it is spiritually (and spiritedly) infused with the transmuted (and transfigured) energies of music. These form trains of “feelingful thought,” which in turn can lead to profound, emotionally freighted reflections. In other words, a virtual agent may be conceived not just as a virtual body but as a distilled part of the virtual subjectivity or consciousness implied by the music.

Unfortunately, we do not have a clear theoretical language to substitute for embodiment when virtual subjectivity is so distilled (I suggest “enmindment” in chap. 3), but artists have sought to reach this level in various ways. Anton Chekhov’s plays are filled with examples of the subtlety with which he could convey, through otherwise plain language, a dramatically charged situation that reveals deeper subjective awareness, to some extent recognized by the characters but to a greater extent experienced by the audience, as drama critic Richard Gilman has demonstrated. He notes how, in Chekhov’s Three Sisters, “the characters never announce who or what they are but simply speak and behave. . . . They make themselves known at every moment, but the important knowledge is chiefly of interiority; we have to follow their signs, using the stuff of our own experience as a guide” (1995, 166; my emphasis). This subjectivity is filled with longing, which we must infer even in the absence of Chekhov’s characters’ direct expression, and it is one of his most powerful aesthetic effects.

For music, even virtual agents who urgently will their virtual actions or actively express their virtual emotions may not be telling the whole story. The merger of individual agents into a larger entity has been explored in terms of a “work-persona” (Monahan 2013) or the persona of the “composer’s voice” (Cone 1974). I instead theorize this merger of virtual agents in terms of their interiorization as components of an individual, virtual subjectivity.

The next chapter explores in more detail this process of virtual actors becoming interiorized as trains of thought within a larger consciousness. I begin here by emphasizing how “enmindment” can occur already at the beginning of a work, apparently bypassing the need for prior embodiment of individual agencies or actors. This powerful subjectivization speaks to the important role of virtualization in our experience of music, even when it appears to evade those “actual” sources of embodiment arising from the experience of shared gestural shapes or energetic profiles.

Consider the opening of the andante from Johannes Brahms’s Piano Quartet in C Minor, op. 60 (example Int.1).¹ Although one may experience emotion as expressed by the contours and dynamics of the opening gesture, much of the specificity of that response may be traced to musical conventions that build on and nuance the physically gestural energy of the opening melos. Certainly, there is a majestic descent followed by an energetically enhanced ascent, but the richness of virtual emotion draws on higher levels of musical engagement with the implications of mode (major), descent in thirds (a style type for Beethoven as well as Brahms), and harmonic mixture (the C

), which inflects the shift to a neighboring harmony (a parenthetical half-diminished seventh) before returning to a glowing E major. Energetics can account for a gracious, spacious, and generous descent followed by a noble (dotted-rhythm) ascent, but notice that even my characterization of the descent and ascent involves inflections acquired from conventional stylistic elements. In other words, the synthesis of elements that make up this rich thematic gesture, while implying a virtual experiencing agent, nevertheless do not reduce to embodiment in a strict sense—that is, as derived from “moving to” the energies of the melodic contour or its intensification by a dotted rhythm and a shift of direction.

Indeed, as a listener I already feel myself experiencing a subjectivity that is closer to spiritual consciousness: reflective, interiorized, and as though a subtle metamorphosis had already been accomplished by the transmutation of higher musical understandings from lower energetics. An experiment may help reveal the difference. Try the same contour and rhythm with radically post-tonal melodic and harmonic constituents and see if anything like the same effect is produced by contour and rhythm alone.

So how does this transmutation occur? What helps us make the leap to full subjective consciousness as informed by emotional qualities that further contribute to a higher state of reflective awareness? Might it already be a habit, a practice that has been inculcated through our experiences of previous works by Brahms, by the Romantics, by Beethoven, by others—how far back in music history should we go? If this is an aesthetic competency inculcated by Western music and enhanced by successive styles, how can we nevertheless ground it in musical and cognitive realities? As soon as the correlations of energy to movement are exhausted at lower levels, must we turn to metaphor?

Invoking metaphor is certainly one way of introducing cognition that can be emergent from literal movement. But consider a similar maneuver that weakens, for me, Nelson Goodman’s (1968) otherwise brilliant theory of exemplification and expression in the arts. First, he observes that exemplification is signification by possession of features (e.g., a red sample signifies red by possessing the property of redness). Next, expression is defined as “metaphorical exemplification,” in that signification is based on the metaphorical possession of features. But what is the basis of this metaphorical possession? How can we decide whether a claimed metaphorical possession is in any way warranted? Clearly, we need the warrant of a symbol system, or style, as Goodman realizes in his subsequent article, “The Status of Style” (1975). But again, how do we establish the “warrant” afforded by any given style? I believe it is through careful reconstruction of the principles, correlations, and interpretive strategies of style considered as a competency in symbolic functioning presupposed by a work of art (Hatten 1982, 1994). Thus, for the Brahms example, we need not limit ourselves only to readily embodied aspects of movement and contour; we may also include the semiotically earned contributions of mode, mixture, harmony, and so forth, which nuance contour and rhythm (and dynamics, pacing, and articulation) into more complex syntheses worthy of the complex emotions and reflections of consciousness.

Example Int.1. Brahms, Piano Quartet in C Minor, second movement, first theme (mm. 1–4 only)

Note an interesting theoretical reversal here: we tend to think of Leonard B. Meyer’s (1989) “secondary” or “statistical” parameters (dynamics, pacing, and articulations) as nuancing harmony and tonality, but in terms of subjectivization, it is harmony and tonality that endow these energetic shadings with deeper content.² Nevertheless, as I demonstrate in my work on musical gesture, even secondary parameters can be thematized as primary (Hatten 2004). And furthermore, they may be our default guides when the syntax of tonality in a work becomes either too complex or too deformed to be immediately interpretable within the style presupposed by that work. Thus, dynamics, pacing, and articulation are faithful clues to embodiment that can also help us make the leap to new forms of subjective experience or reflective consciousness.

Melody is a curious parameter in that it includes both the dynamic contouring of pitches and the tonal voice leading of pitch classes. Raw contour is invoked in my Brahms example, with mode, mixture, and neighboring harmonic functions relegated to a “higher” musical level of style. Melody, fascinatingly and often frustratingly for a staged theory of agency, combines both raw contour with stylistic voice leading and harmonic implications at the start (and further merges with the melos of an entire texture). Thus, Steve Larson’s (2012) very basic musical forces already imply the virtual environmental contributions of tonality for both gravity (implying a stable platform) and magnetism (half-step attraction implying voice-leading function). But recall that Larson’s “force” of inertia does not require or presuppose tonality—it is simply the observed tendency of a process/pattern (or its absence) to continue (or persist), unless impeded (or energized) in some way. Thus, pitches, when melodized as contour and durational patterning, are amenable to Larson’s force descriptions (and my virtual agential energies) and can directly evoke mimetic/energetic correlations leading to experiences of embodiment, even in the absence of tonality’s voice leading or meter’s conditioned rhythms.³

But to return to the issue of embodiment: What kind of embodiment is focal for Cox’s (2016) mimetic hypothesis? Primarily, it is the way a listener can literally (and then imaginatively) embody the energies of the music being heard. Granted the existence and strong plausibility of such a mode of listening, might there be a difference between that mode and one in which the listener infers a virtual agent who is virtually embodying a virtual experience of those energies? Might those virtual experiences be interpretable as virtual emotions being expressed or experienced by that virtual agent? In other words, how do we position the actual listener with respect to the virtual agent? This may seem not to be an issue when we speak of a listener identifying with whatever emotions and psychological journeys she may infer from the music. In such a case, the listener may appear to function as the virtual agent experiencing music’s expressions. But consider the important distancing implied by empathy and, even more obviously, sympathy. Here, the emotions evoked, triggered, and selectively experienced by the engaged listener may not be equal to (as in the case of identification) or equivalent to (as in the case of empathy) but indeed divergent from (as in the case of sympathy) those that may be inferred as experienced by a virtual agent. The divergence may be either positively sympathetic (pity) or negatively unsympathetic (disgust).

What does this wrinkle entail for a theory of embodiment? Might it suggest that along with finding ways to explain how we can actually move to the music, we might also (at the same time) need to explain how we move against the music? Or, to put it less oppositionally, how might we explain the listener’s neg...