A Theory of Virtual Agency for Western Art Music by Robert S. Hatten
Ian Wyatt Gerg · Notes · 2020
Reviewed by: A Theory of Virtual Agency for Western Art Music by Robert S. Hatten Ian Gerg A Theory of Virtual Agency for Western Art Music. By Robert S. Hatten. (Musical Meaning and Interpretation.) Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2018. [x, 326 p. ISBN 9780253037978 (hardcover), $85; ISBN 9780253037985 (paperback), $32; ISBN 9780253037992 (e-book), price varies.] Music examples, tables, bibliography, index. In A Theory of Virtual Agency for Western Art Music, Robert S. Hatten examines agency as it is projected by music and perceived by listeners. This is not the actual agency of the composer or performer but the virtual one that emerges from within music through melodic contours, rhythms, dynamics, and other musical elements that come together to resemble human movement, thought, and emotion. Hatten appeals to our imagination as listeners and invites us to pursue the implications of our physical, cognitive, and emotional interactions with music. He observes that "we as listeners are predisposed to engage with a kind of subjective identification whenever we listen to music" (p. 170). This book explores how this happens and follows the interpretive consequences of it. A look at the table of contents reveals a less rigid structure than the books with which it will likely share a shelf. Instead of the more typical two-part division that separates theory from analysis, this book blends the two and situates its ten chapters amid an introduction, prelude, two interludes, and a postlude without a significant divide. The chapters are highly focused, while the peripheral sections give the book a space to breathe and keep the big picture in sight for the reader. The introduction and chapters 1 through 5 flow directly from Hatten's previous book, Interpreting Musical Gestures and Tropes (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004). These pages, however, show a significant maturation of thought during the intervening years. As the title suggests, Hatten sharpens his focus on virtual agency—its nature and capability as a hermeneutic tool. These pages further draw connections to recent scholarship in embodied cognition and musical metaphor, which have clearly contributed to the refinement of his conception of virtual agency and subjectivity. Chapters 6 through 9 more deeply explore the [End Page 141] analytical potentials of the core theory, examining emotion, narrative agency, and performative agency. Chapter 9 offers a thorough analysis of a ballade by Frédéric Chopin that integrates all elements of his greater expressive theory. The final chapter reaches outward and proposes applications to music after the nineteenth century. Readers unfamiliar with agency and action theory may approach this book cautiously but will soon find that it is inviting, as it appeals to their natural sensibilities as listeners. The introduction and chapter 1 clarify the premise by describing agency as a philosophical concept. In short, "agents" are entities that have the capacity for intentional action. Performers are agents. Composers are agents. Even listeners are agents because they perform the act of listening. This volume, however, focuses on virtual agents—those that we perceive when listening to music but do not have actual material bodies. We—listeners—sense these virtual agents in the striving of a melody, the liveliness of a dance, and the impatience of an accelerando. When Anton Schindler famously wrote that Ludwig van Beethoven's Fifth Symphony begins with Fate knocking at the door, he was describing the actions and intentions of a virtual agent. But because virtual agents lack the materiality of their actual/real counterparts, listeners must identify them through the perception of sound as action and the inference of intention, thought, and being. Perceiving a melody as a virtual agent in music, then, is fundamentally similar to perceiving virtual voice assistants like Alexa and Siri as thinking, feeling humans. Curiously, influential action and agency theorists such as G. E. M. Anscombe, Donald Davidson, and Daniel D. Dennett are nowhere to be found in this book. John Searle and J. L. Austin are merely tucked amid endnotes. These would have been welcome company for Hatten, particularly in chapter 1 ("Foundations for a Theory of Agency"), which is somewhat light on citations. Although this makes for a more facile reading experience, scholars of agency in other fields may approach the book...