Musical Agency and the Social Listener

Cora S. Palfy

• Éditeur: Routledge
• Année: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000463361
• Édition: 1
• Sujet: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Sous-sujet: Teoría y apreciación musicales

Music as a narrative drama is an intriguing idea, which has captured explicit music theoretical attention since the nineteenth century. Investigations into narrative characters or personae has evolved into a sub-field—musical agency. In this book, Palfy contends that music has the potential to engage us in social processes and that those processes can be experienced as a social interaction with a musical agent. She explores the overlap between the psychological processes in which we participate in order to understand and engage with people, and those we engage in when we listen to music. Thinking of musical agency as a form of social process is quite different from existing theoretical frameworks for agency. It implies that we come to musical analysis by way of intuition—that our ideas are already partially formed based on our experience of the piece (and what it makes us feel or how it makes us sense it as any other) when we choose to analyze and interpret it. Palfy's focus on social processes is a very effective way to pinpoint when and why it is that our attention is captured and engaged by musical agents.

1Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003169710-1

Music as a narrative drama is an intriguing idea, one which highlights the creativity and imagination with which listeners approach understanding music. As analysts delved deeper into the subject, they regarded its facets with ever-closer scrutiny—is music inherently dramatic, or is “drama” simply a metaphor? Can music contain dramatic agents, like characters of stage or story? Are the entities we hear in music real or just figments of the imagination? These questions are popular in contemporary theoretical literature because of the many analytical and philosophical issues they raise; they have evolved into a subfield within musical narrativity—musical agency. Though a thematic thread in both critical responses and analytical treatises since the eighteenth century, musical agency has been examined explicitly since Edward T. Cone published The Composer's Voice (1974). In her own work expanding the topic, Naomi Cumming defines emergent musical agents succinctly as “a subjective character heard as embodied in the music, as the carrier of an expressive impetus or intent.”¹

Though Cumming's definition accurately captures the concept of “musical agency” as it has been characterized by contemporary theorists, the reader may still find theorists’ use of the term “musical agency” unclear. To clarify, I refer to several passages from agential analyses (some of which may not overtly use the term “agency”). Cone comments,

In a wider context, one might say that the expressive power of every art depends on the communication of a certain kind of experience, and that each art in its own way projects the illusion of the existence of a personal subject [an agent] through whose consciousness that experience is made known to the rest of us.²

The sense of tapping into otherwise intangible worlds and experiences has since been elaborated. Fred Everett Maus notes, “If the [musical] analysis contains descriptions of an action or motivation that cannot be ascribed to the composer or performers, and if this fact does not show that the analysis is wrong, then it seems the analysis involves the ascription of at least one action to an imaginary agent.”³ Maus's description highlights that agency is often an interpretive outcome, the result of creative and artistic impressions that may be understood as a coherent, expressive entity within the music. Indeed, this is what I most often encounter when reading agential analyses: analysts resort to agency as an artistic metaphor for dramatic effect within a critical analysis.

However, the use of agency is not always metaphorical—many analysts’ language reveals that agency is an experience resulting from listening rather than simply descriptive language. Take, for instance, Matthew BaileyShea, who wrote about musical agency emerging within Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings. He states, “Put simply, the quartet continually creates the impression of a singular musical persona struggling—and ultimately failing—to rise up to a stable major mode.”⁴ An agent is emergent from the work, and BaileyShea alludes to the fact that this “agent” can be illusory. These authors’ arguments clarify Cumming's definition by pinpointing musical agency as a perceptual phenomenon: in many cases, analysts are describing an experience of musical listening that produces a perceived impression of one or more virtual personae. This commonality draws attention to and centers the listener's perception as a crucial element in understanding agency.

The virtual

My argument that agency exists and can be understood as a listener's perception of a virtual other in response to some musical stimulus rests on two premises:

1. People consistent describe agency in the analytical literature with enough specificity that accounts of agents “emerging” from music are quite clear and well-supported.
2. The prevalence of these accounts leads to the interpretation that analysts are comprehending music as having human-like properties and that the perception of virtual agency within their hearings is coloring analytical interpretations.

If, indeed, these statements are true, then listeners are engaging in the psychological processes of mind reading and anthropomorphization when attributing agency in music. I posit that these psychological processes are unfolding because people (and therefore listeners) like to think of music as a “human” thing; it is made by people, and it is meant to be heard by others. Thus, we find anthropomorphization of music around every analytical corner and read, write, and use musical agents in ways that are ultimately illuminating.

Throughout this book, I argue that one of the reasons theorists and listeners produce analyses, metaphors, and interpretations involving musical agency is that those explanations match the experience they feel when hearing music. Agential analyses articulate a visceral experience that is invisible to the eye and that is, instead, aural and kinesthetic. Listeners are not responding in an imaginative dream state or through a hyperbolic dramatization, but are rather putting words and descriptions to their own experience of feeling socially engaged by music—an experience of music as a human-like thing.

The impulse to anthropomorphize aural phenomena uncovers a connection that other theorists, such as Naomi Cumming, Robert Hatten, Arnie Cox, and Ian Gerg (among others), have been emphasizing as a “virtual experience”—an experience akin to being in the world; of living, of moving, and of interacting with musical agents. Hatten, for example, explains the concept thusly:

A virtual agent in music is not an actual agent, but its “efficiency” lies in its capacity to simulate the actions, emotions, and reactions of a human agent. More theoretically, the virtual addresses the gap between music's actual material or physical aspects as (organized) sound, and those irreducible and emergent semiotic inferences that enable us to hear music as having movement, agency, emotional expression, and even subjectivity.⁵

This idea of “simulation” is echoed in other works. What Hatten intimates here speaks to the experiential nature of agency—that our experiences with music as an agent are, despite the absence of a tangible person or subjectivity, close enough that our descriptions can be considered “real.” This idea is further enhanced if we consider the way in which both emotions and gestures have been approached by theorists. Cox's language dovetails with Hatten's, as it shows a deference to music's ability to express emotion:

When it is plainly not the performer [expressing a genuine emotion], the persona portrayed by the performer, or the composers, and yet it feels as though we have perceived the expression of an emotion, we understand the aesthetic context in terms of the practical whenever we then infer the expressive agent known as The Music. In such cases, we understand music as if it were a kind of expressive agent. …⁶

Cox relies within his work on ideas of musical gesturing and motion that are similarly visceral and realistic and that are echoed by Ian Gerg, who notes that “the virtual physical gesture (i.e., knocking [in the opening motive of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony]) that we hear in the music implies a virtual agent (i.e., Fate). I will further define the virtual agent as a unified sentient entity with the capacity for virtual gesture.”⁷ In a sense, listeners’ experience of musical narratives and their constituent characters are very real, which is why listeners feel the urge to explain their heard and felt experiences.⁸

With an increased understanding of virtuality, theorists have begun to acknowledge agency not as an analytical fiction or metaphor, but as a psychological response to and processing of music's effects upon the human mind as an actor. This conceptualization of virtuality encourages a deeper dive into the psychological roots of that virtuality. I argue that music is so easily anthropomorphized by listeners because of music's intimate connections with social processes and the way the brain perceives and interacts with music as an “other.”

Social processes

As a way of exploring the idea of the listener's perception of a musical social actor, consider the following analogous thought experiment. Imagine, if you will, taking a solo tour of Madame Tussauds wax museum in London: as you walk in, you are struck by the surrounding likenesses of celebrities, politicians, and historical figures. As you work your way through the museum, you might pose with certain figurines or take a picture, enjoying the fact that these objects are there for your use and enjoyment. Consider how different your behavior would be if, instead of standing in front of a wax figurine of Marilyn Monroe, you were confronted by the starlet herself. Your behavior would shift; you would likely ask to pose with the star, shake hands, or exchange a few words. These shifts in behavior mark a significant human deference to prosocial behavior, or behavior that facilitates positive and effective interactions with others. Human behavior shifts when confronted with social interaction rather than isolation: we consider the behavioral exchanges, opportunities for interactions, and seek out social cues.

Now take this thought experiment one step further. As you walk by yourself, you are not expecting any of the wax objects to be responsive; in a sense, that's what makes the journey through the museum so iconic and enjoyable (how else could you hug Elton John?). However, as you walk, you notice a smaller, childlike wax figure that you do not recognize, and walk up to it to investigate more closely. As you move around it, you are struck by the realistic nature of the figure and are impressed by the work of the craftsman. As you lean in to look at the construction of the face, it sticks its tongue out at you—in fact, this whole time, the figure was a child, posing stock-still and playing a joke on the people walking through the museum. You jump back, fully aware that your behavior towards this person—the way in which you treated it like an object for observation and solipsistic interest—was completely inappropriate. You apologize, startled, and move away, placing distance between yourself and the child. As you continue walking through the museum, though, this experience begins to niggle at you; you question whether any other figures you passed were playing similar tricks. You might also begin to wonder what the rest of the child's day comprised, what the child did in the past and will do next. Suddenly, your whole experience of the day has shifted to accommodate this unexpected social interaction with someone you had initially perceived as an object.

Virtual agency in music works similarly. Just as the wax objects in Madame Tussauds may mask some potential presence, so, too, do pieces of music. However, not all wax figures in Madame Tussauds “came alive”; only one gave social cues, and it was the one treated differently. This is where the analogy is relevant to musical agency and the importance of defining it thoroughly and carefully: though music has the potential to capture and communicate virtual agency, it does not always. Many current theories of musical agency do not take into account the fact that music may contain only discrete moments of agential interaction for a listener; in many cases, large swaths of music may seem neutral in terms of narrative impact or agential attribution. However, it is yet unclear as to why that is and how to analyze, given agency's inconsistent presence within music.

My main contention within this book is that music has the potential to engage us in social processes and that those processes can be experienced viscerally as a social interaction with a virtual “other.” Throughout the book, I return to the same conclusion: musical agencies trigger the same mechanisms through which people sense and interact with each other in daily life—music is able to trigger us by using processes that satisfy three conditions (human-like movement, empathy, and deferral of expectation). By framing agency through virtuality and social processing, the concept of itself is clarified: musical agency is the product of simulated social cuing and interaction between a listener and music as a virtual other. While music can serve as a medium that makes the composer, artist, or performer obvious as a creative agent, I am primarily interested in the way in which listeners can hear music itself as an intentional, willful virtual agent.

Thinking of musical agency as a form of social process is quite different from existing theoretical frameworks. It implies that we come to musical analysis by way of intuition—that our ideas are already partially formed based on our psychological experience of the piece (what it makes us feel or how it makes us sense it as an other) when we choose to analyze and interpret it. My focus on social cuing in particular pinpoints when it is that our attention is captured and engaged by musical agents. Further, we can begin to understand more clearly why some spans of music contain visceral, perceptible agents while others do not. Finally, drawing agency into social strata acknowledges agency as an experience of music that many listeners have, regardless of experience or train...

Table des matières

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of music examples
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Agency in music, agency in mind
• 3 Social affordances and agency
• 4 Virtual agency in the social mind
• 5 The effect of repeated listening on narrative and agency
• 6 Social cues through rhythm and meter in Johannes Brahms's Sieben Fantasien Op. 116, No. 7: Capriccio
• 7 Range and climax expectations in Journey's “Don't Stop Believin'”
• 8 Cadential expectations and expressive agency in Lin-Manuel Miranda's “How Far I'll Go” (Moana)
• 9 Formal cues and expectations in Cécile Chaminade's Piano Sonata Op. 21, I
• 10 Agency's place and practice
• Appendix A: Expectations, rhythm, and meter
• Appendix B: Expectations for range and climax within rock music
• Appendix C: Harmonic syntax and expectations
• Appendix D: Formal structure and listener expectation
• Bibliography
• Index