Musical Forces and Agential Energies: An Expansion of Steve Larson’s Model

[1] From the time Steve Larson and I were friends at Michigan nearly thirty years ago, I have appreciated Steve's native intelligence and sensitive musicianship, and admired its flowering into some of the most original and thought-provoking work in the interdisciplinary reaches of music theory. Whether adapting Schenkerian analysis to explain jazz improvisation, drawing on music cognitive findings to explain prolongation and improve aural skills pedagogy, or collaborating with a renowned philosopher to explain how we interpret movement in music, Steve's creative energies knew no bounds.(1)[2] Steve's metaphorical application of physical forces to explain continuities in melodic and rhythmic patterning is one of his signature contributions to the field of music theory. As he gathered converging evidence for his theory of musical forces, I was honored to help shepherd his book, Musical Forces: Motion, Metaphor, and Meaning in Music, to publication in January 2012.(2) As early as 2003, during his residency in Bloomington, I had shared with him some of my own conjectural expansions to his theory, from the perspective of my work on gestural agency and its energies. In my book on musical gesture I cited his evidence for musical forces as part of a virtual physical environment with reference to which listeners can experience, or infer, embodied agency. I also briefly introduced agentially motivated motion, considered momentum as a supplement to the concept of inertia, and suggested the possibility of virtual musical friction (Hatten 2004, 115-16).(3) Here, in honor of Steve and inspired by his own quest for analogues and metaphors of motion in music, I will expand on those initial speculations.(4)Example 1. Arrows indicate the directional forces of gravity (G), magnetism (M), and inertia (I)[3] First, let's review how we hear music when we infer Larson's musical forces of gravity, magnetism, and inertia. A melody, as he puts it, "gives in" to these musical forces, and throughout the book he offers compelling examples of the typicality of such motion. Gravity, by analogy to our human experience of it on earth, is the tendency to descend to a stable platform (stability here determined by tonal context). Magnetism is the tendency to move in either direction to the closest stable pitch in a given collection's alphabet, or scale. And inertia is the tendency of a given state, process, or patterning to continue. These forces can be mutually supportive, or they can counteract each other. In Example 1 a stepwise descent from scale-degree to in C major is impelled by both gravity (descent to a stable platform) and magnetism (moving toward the closest stable pitch-here, a half step away). Continuing by step to tonic will exemplify inertia (in tandem with gravity in this example) but contradict magnetism, since E moves to D a whole step away, instead of back by half step to F.(5) Continuing stepwise motion past the tonic C to B further exemplifies inertia, in that the downward motion tends to continue, here with enough force to push past a stable platform. But in this example, the magnetism of B to resolve to C may then be understood as counteracting both inertia and gravity: overcoming inertia by changing direction, and overcoming (earthbound) gravity by changing that direction from down to up. This brief example illustrates only the most basic application of the theory.Example 2. Musical forces are constrained by patterning (a. motivic and b. rhythmic), which predicts alternate closures for the same pitch patternExample 3. Musical forces are constrained by harmonic motion; the root of a chord creates an alternative platform for gravity[4] Larson also annexes Schenker's prolongational levels; when a pattern of pitches moves as a unit (e.g., in the case of a sequence), both the pattern and its structural pitches will be constrained by Larson's three forces. …