- Home
- A Theory of Virtual Agency for Western Art Music
Preparing your PDF for download...
There was a problem with your download, please contact the server administrator.
A Theory of Virtual Agency for Western Art Music
Published by: Indiana University Press
334 Pages, 2 b&w illus., 88 music exx.
- eBook
- 9780253038012
- Published: September 2018
$14.99
Other Retailers:
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.
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Prelude: From Gesture to Virtual Agency
1. Foundations for a Theory of Agency
2. Virtual Environmental Forces and Gestural Energies: Actants
3. Virtual Embodiment: From Actants to Agents
4. Virtual Identity and Actorial Continuity
Interlude I: From Embodiment to Subjectivity
5. Staging Virtual Subjectivity
6. Virtual Subjectivity and Aesthetically Warranted Emotions
7. Staging Virtual Narrative Agency
8. Performing Agency
9. An Integrative Agential Interpretation of Chopin's Ballade in F Minor, Op. 52
Interlude II: Hearing Agency: A Complex Cognitive Task
10. Other Perspectives on Virtual Agency
Postlude
Bibliography
Index of Names and Works
Index of Concepts
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.
"...a brilliant tour de force concerning an issue at the forefront of musical meaning today: the problem of agency...[which] could only be written by someone with a lifetime of experience and study."
~Michael Klein, author of Music and the Crises of the Modern Subject
"
Robert Hatten's A Theory of Virtual Agency for Western Art Music is a magisterial contribution to music theory. It is substantial in content; immensely wide-ranging in musical and critical reference; penetratingly thought through and argued; and superbly written and organized. It is a joy to watch the arc of Hatten's thought as it builds on his earlier writings and fulfills his trilogy of books.
" ~Michael Spitzer, author of Music as Philosophy
"Robert Hatten's A Theory of Virtual Agency for Western Music [is] a magisterial contribution to music theory. It is substantial[in] content; immensely wide-ranging in musical and critical reference; penetratingly thought through and argued; and superbly written and organized."
~Michael Spitzer, author of Beethoven, vol. 1
"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, Chestnut Hill College, Notes
Related Books
