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 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.

Reviews

The book represents a major effort and achievement from one the era's most influential music theorists. . . . Essential.

* Choice *

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. . . . Scholars and performers eager to discover imaginative yet authentic ways to experience and understand music will enjoy this book and relish finding themselves within it.

-- Ian Gerg * Notes *



Book Information
ISBN 9780253037985
Author Robert S. Hatten
Format Paperback
Page Count 334
Imprint Indiana University Press
Publisher Indiana University Press