Musical Agency and the Social Listener

Cora S. Palfy's approach to narrative-based analysis in Musical Agency and the Social Listener focuses on how listeners and analysts come to ascribe agency to elements of music. She draws from a wealth of prior research in music theory, cognitive science, and media studies, with the first half of the book reviewing and synthesizing this research. In the second half, Palfy demonstrates her approach in four analytical vignettes, which engage styles ranging from solo piano works of Brahms to anthemic rock of the 1980s.After introductory remarks in chapter 1, Palfy opens chapter 2 with one of the book's central claims: that musical agency is not metaphorical; rather it is real in the sense that music triggers the same cognitive mechanisms that are triggered during social interaction. When listening to music, she argues, one's mind may detect the same cues—such as patterned utterances—that would prompt them to recognize a literal agent in real life. She reviews research from cognitive science and media studies that argues for this understanding of virtual agency in multimedia and everyday life. Much of this work shows that when watching film or television or playing video games, humans may have the same emotional, physiological, and physical responses to virtual agents that they do to real ones. Importantly for her argument, Palfy cites research suggesting that people form social connections with fictional characters, developing empathy and identifying with them. While she focuses on agency in multimedia in this chapter, the discussion builds evidence for her central claims regarding music specifically.Chapter 3 explores what Palfy calls social affordances in music. Invoking James J. Gibson's concept of affordance, she summarizes two lines of prior argument. First, she examines Eric F. Clarke's (2005) ecological theory of music perception, which argues that music draws from listeners’ habits of real-world perception to create a sort of virtual space. Next, she describes Gibson's (2015) notion of social affordance, wherein objects, events, or people afford opportunities for social interaction, as when a door held open by another affords the chance to say thank you. Palfy then considers how music can create social affordances for listeners. She discusses interactions by performers, such as jazz improvisers’ unspoken coordination or rock stars’ banter with their crowds. Invoking Edward T. Cone's (1974) notion of the composer's voice, Palfy argues that composers leave traces of their personae by building social affordances into their music. She goes on to discuss the idea of artistic agents, a term she developed in prior work to refer to the public images of popular musicians. The chapter ends with a reflection on what Palfy calls imagined performers. Drawing on Arnie Cox's (2016) concept of mimetic motor imagery, she argues that listeners may imagine a performer's unseen movements, thereby creating social affordances—with fast pianistic fingering, for example—suggesting anxiety.In the first half of chapter 4, entitled “Virtual Agency in the Social Mind,” Palfy argues that a listener's perception of virtual agency may be triggered by three types of musical phenomena: those that mimic physical motion, those a listener may self-identify with, and those which deny or defer expectations. She notes that if one of these three properties is exhibited by a nonliving object, humans are likely to ascribe agency to it, according to findings by behavioral scientist Nicholas Epley (2014). Palfy develops the ideas of motion and self-identification mainly through critique of prior music theory—noting, for example, that Steven Rings (2008) wrote of a “footstep-like” ostinato in Debussy's Des pas sur la neige; or that Fred Everett Maus (1988) exhibits a kind of empathy when noting the “clumsiness” or “confusion” apparent in Beethoven's String Quartet No. 11, op. 95. With regard to expectations, Palfy proposes the concept of kinesthetic autonomy, which she defines as “the sense that one's embodies responses to music are one's own and are under the listener's control” (52). Unexpected events, she argues, disrupt a listener's kinesthetic autonomy, creating the effect of a virtual agent wresting control from the listener.The second half of chapter 4 presents the book's first extended analysis, which considers how motion, self-identification, and expectation serve as cues of virtual agency in the opening of Beethoven's “Tempest” sonata, op. 31/2. She offers several suggestive insights—about how the right hand's restruck suspensions in mm. 3–5 reflect a virtual agent reluctant to move downward; how a listener might self-identify with the pianist's light physical touch in mm. 1–2 suddenly giving way to the “rushed” and “hectic” fingering of the next four bars; and how the opening's ambiguous status as either an introduction or first theme has implications for listener expectation. While the analysis is suggestive, I left it with some confusion as to how it connects to her theoretical framework. She discusses, for instance, the sudden “shift in energy and momentum” (57) at m. 7 with regard to motion, even though that seems like more of an expectation denial. Nonetheless, her choice of music is a good one; like so much in middle Beethoven, this sonata invites discussion in the language of human agency, blazing as it does with manic energy, obsessive development, and the unshakable torment of a troubled mind. Rarely does work like Palfy's apply better than in such repertoire.Chapter 5 considers the effect of repeated listening in agent-based analysis. Palfy begins by suggesting that musical analysis often strays too far from the analyst's embodied response to the music: When analysts listen to music, we often get lost in the fray of systematic listening methods, pattern matching, or aural- and score-based searches for continuity. . . . However, this kind of top-down, distanced listening can put analysts at a significant remove from the body's visceral response to the music. Particularly where agency is concerned, the question arises: how are analysts feeling and responding to the presence of agents, and how are those feelings expressed in their writing? (64; italics original)To address this issue, Palfy invokes Cone's (1974) notion of three types of “hearings”: a first that takes in an unfamiliar piece, a second that analyzes and makes sense of it, and a third that casts off this intellectual knowledge but lets it enrich one's intuitive experience of the music. Palfy argues that agent-based analysis is the stuff of second hearings but should grow out of the analyst's embodied responses during first hearings. For this reason, she narrates her own “first hearings” of all music she analyzes in later chapters. As an example, she closes chapter 5 by recounting her first hearing of Mozart's String Quintet No. 3, K. 515, movement 1, in which she finds herself “jarred” by the opening five-bar phrases and “almost disappointed” at the brevity of what she labels the second theme.Chapters 6 through 9 offer four analytical vignettes that illustrate Palfy's approach. Each vignette examines a different piece and focuses on a different aspect of musical structure. In these analyses, Palfy promises to consider only agency stemming from expectation denial or deferral, noting that the effects of self-identification and motion have been covered in prior research.In chapter 6, Palfy looks at Brahms's Seven Fantasies, op. 116/7, and focuses on metric ambiguity and conflict. The crux of her analysis is the B section, which is built around a texture whose melody is nested in an inner voice and, though written in 6/8, suggests a 3/4 meter offset by an eighth note (see Example 1). Palfy begins by narrating her “first hearing,” noting with regard to the B section, Whenever I attempt to listen to the inner-voice melody, the accompaniment's triplet figures push my body out of alignment. . . . Each time I feel that I have finally attuned to one element's meter, my kinesthetic autonomy is disrupted by a musical presence over and over again throughout the section. The B section's most metrical features function as a social cue for my body: I feel that someone is moving me with their invisible hands (83–84).This social cue is the basis for one of the virtual agents Palfy discusses vis-à-vis her “second” and “third hearings.” Her second hearing makes heavy use of Robert S. Hatten's (2018) topical and gestural methods of analysis, with an eye toward their implications as to social affordance. She suggests, for example, that the B section's melody affords a virtual agent who is singing (given the cantabile topic) while also struggling to stay aloft (due to the sinking gesture). Her third hearing works to reconcile her observations from the first two hearings into one narrative account, invoking the image of a person bobbing in rough water: “The B section focuses the listener's attention on one tiny speck in the waves, but the sighing agent seems surrounded by water—sinking, swimming, or reaching up and then sinking again with the rise and fall of the water around them” (93).Palfy's analysis is suggestive, and had this chapter been a talk, I would have eagerly engaged with questions. In particular, I wonder about the roles of scores and recordings in this sort of analysis. The metric dissonance of Brahms's B section seems most salient when listening with score, since the misalignment of melody and meter is visible. Absent a score, however, one's experience may change greatly. I, for one, have little trouble hearing the whole passage in a shifted 3/4, with a beat at the start of each inner-voice note and the upper fills beginning on the offbeat. Especially since most pianists ritardando dramatically just before this section, realigning into an offset three is natural enough. The performer, moreover, can do much to encourage or discourage this realignment. Emanual Ax (1995) plays the B section's melody with such rhythmic drive that it is hard not to hear its notes as the tactus. Stephan Sylvestre (1998), on the other hand, brings out the upper-voice eighths and their notated accents, perhaps encouraging the metric perturbations Palfy experiences in her first hearing. That performers hold such sway over Palfy's brand of analysis highlights the importance of considering, as she does, the many currents of human agency that intersect in music.Chapter 7 offers an analysis of “Don't Stop Believin’” by Journey. Palfy's analysis centers around the lead guitar: its repeating runs after the second verse, its solo after the third, and its joining with the bass and piano's left hand when the song finally arrives at its chorus, almost three-fourths of the way through.1 In her first hearing, Palfy describes her reaction to several aspects of the song's structure, illustrating her points with a large number of transcriptions. “I hear the first clear example of agential emergence,” she writes, “during the guitar solo” (101) that follows the third verse.2 This solo, she notes, begins an octave above what had previously been the climactic, second-highest note of the melody, but the guitar then sweeps up a minor seventh, solos in this higher register, and ends with a 7^-to-1^ motion at the peak of this range. She states that her “kinesthetic autonomy has been disrupted by the use of multiple climactic points within the song” (104). In her second hearing, Palfy argues that the guitar solo affords empathy from the listener in multiple ways, with the minor-seventh initiation, for example, having features of “Hatten's human-like thematic gesture” (107). In her third hearing, Palfy suggests that the lead guitar's agent can be heard as introducing “rebellious and persistent ‘hope’” into the song, in keeping with its title.In chapter 8, Palfy presents her analysis of the song “How Far I'll Go” from Lin-Manuel Miranda's Moana. Her “first hearing” notes several oddities about the song, three of which become crucial in her narrative interpretation. The first is the repeated use of V-I cadence with ii{half-diminished six-five}-I progressions, featuring the modal-mixture C♮-B♮ motion in E major. The second is a modulation from E major to F major, with C♮ serving as a common tone. The third is the song's final cadence, which shifts abruptly from F major to C major. Palfy's subsequent narrative analysis zeros in on the pitch C♮. Invoking Cone, Palfy suggests that C “is treated as a promissory note within the musical structure” (121), serving first as an inner-voice cadential resolution, then as the common tone for a modulation, and finally as an unexpected ending tonic. In the ii{half-diminished six-five}-I cadences, Palfy suggests, the C “functions as an agent of Moana's inner desires” (121). But later in the song, this note “affords opportunity for action within the common-tone modulation. . . . Finally, C becomes the goal at the close of the piece—as Moana pushes her boat out to sea over the final chord flourish” (122).Palfy's final analysis in chapter 9 covers Cécile Chaminade's 1985 Piano Sonata, op. 21, movement 1. Palfy focuses on the formal treatment of themes. The principal theme, she argues, involves energetic, minor-mode figuration and thereby invokes darker topoi such as Sturm und Drang, but the subsequent transition employs figuration reminiscent of the brilliant topic. Given these conflicting moods, Palfy suggests that the principal theme's agent functions as what she calls “a sort of Byronic hero archetype . . . which today might be referred to as an anti-hero” (135). With regard to the subordinate theme, Palfy suggests that two types of topics are invoked: learned topics when the theme's material first appears during a fugato, and the pastorale when the theme later appears in more homophonic texture. She also notes that the subordinate theme never gets recapitulated in full or in the home key, meaning the movement never attains “essential sonata closure” (ESC) à la James Hepokoski and Warren Darcy (2006) and the sonata therefore “fails.” In her third hearing, Palfy employs Gregory Karl's (1997) approach to musical narrative, designating the principal theme as “antagonist” based on its Byronic-hero characteristics and the subordinate theme as “protagonist” due to its contrasting topics. The movement's “plot,” she suggests, involves the antagonist defeating the protagonist, causing the sonata's failure.This movement offers a fascinating case study from the standpoint of Palfy's methodology. Like many pieces from the late nineteenth century, it calls out for a narrativist interpretation in which themes serve as characters in a great drama. Indeed, Palfy's analysis suggests the possibility of going even further than she does and jettisoning Hepokoski and Darcy's sonata theory as an analytical prior. As these authors themselves acknowledge, their theory is built primarily around a sonata tradition that preceded Chaminade's Sonata by many decades. While listeners steeped in this earlier repertoire may be surprised by missing ESCs and fugato delays of secondary themes, other listeners could track the movement in a more flexible way, recognizing thematic repetition, contrast, and interplay but not expecting the precise script laid out by Hepokoski and Darcy. Palfy's interpretive framework would become even more valuable to such a listener.And this, in a larger sense, is the book's most important contribution: new avenues of thought that readers can explore in their own analyses—avenues that accommodate diverse theoretical orientations while capturing the fact that music is a social activity, with performers communicating with each other and works sitting in dialogue with norms of larger musical communities. As I read Musical Agency and the Social Listener, I found myself rewarded not only by Palfy's analyses but also by considering how her framework applied to whatever music I listened to later in the day.I also found Palfy's literature review invaluable. She covers a broad spectrum of prior work, summarizing it with enough detail to orient readers unfamiliar with the sources. Those seeking a brief introduction to music-theoretic literature on agency could do far worse. For all these reasons, I expect Palfy's volume will prove useful to theorists of many stripes for years to come.